Jenny Who?
by CaitlinJ1021
Summary: The life of the Doctor's Daughter as she travels the universe for 200 years. Jenny drifts through multiple names and places and planets and eras trying to find the Doctor, but also trying to discover who she is without him and making her own way. However, harsh moral choices and questions of survival challenge whether she is capable of being the hero she desires.
1. Nobody

**Author's Note/Introduction: This fic is a prequel fic to my epic 2 million word saga of _3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?_ and _4 Doctors, 12 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?_ however, being as it is a prequel, it has no bearing on either of those fics or their continuity and you do not have to read them at all to read this fic. But if you really like it, then feel free to go read it, though since I started it in 2013 the writing quality is pretty poor to being with. Much poorer than this. This is entirely a story about what happened to Jenny after she stole the ship from Messaline, but does _not_ feature the Doctor or any companions, it's solo, just for her, and she deserves her own story after her sacrifice and paternal abandonment.**

 **Nobody**

 _Tungtrun, 25_ _th_ _of July, 6012_

A vibrant, blue sunset spread across the skyline and blurred brightly like electricity along the horizon, the white sun setting halfway below the edge of the frozen planet. It was a ball of ice, an uninhabitable surface, in the middle of its winter cycle when a black shape drifted into view far above, as tiny as a star, floating hundreds of miles above the atmosphere in space. It hovered peacefully along for some time, gliding between the nebulas in the sky and the distant galaxies, the sky crisp and vibrant, shades of blue into deep, dark purples.

Then the black blot started to grow. It didn't grow very large, because it wasn't a very large object to begin with, but there was no mistaking that it was drawing closer and closer and closer, faster and faster and faster. A blue glow started up around it, shimmering hazily just like the horizon did, as it came hurtling dangerously towards the planet. It had dropped out of orbit, succumbed to the gravity, and now it was burning around the edges in oranges and indigos like a gas flame, and a whooshing noise accompanied it as it drew closer, a metal fireball. It was a spaceship, and it was unmistakably crashing.

It came speeding towards the icy surface, the thick snowscape, a flaming mass, the engines cut off, control completely lost, the pilot unable to regain command, if the pilot was even still alive. Like lightning it collided with the planet's surface and shot like a sleigh through the snow, the heavy white powder pummelling it and rising across the hull as it slowed, leaving a sooty, smoking slipstream behind it. The wreckage slowed to a halt in the middle of the sloping tundra, smoking curling in ash-filled wisps from the corners and the cracks in the hull where the engines sat underneath, stuttering out to silence. For some seconds, the only sound to be heard was that of the dying, crackling flames, and the chilly wind singing around it in a harsh descant.

A door on the side was pushed open violently, creaking upwards and then snapping off of its hinges. It fell with a soft, heavy noise into the deep snow and kicked up a fine mist for a second, before everything settled and somebody fell out of the wreckage.

Jenny staggered out of it, coughing, clutching her side intensely and dropping to her knees on the broken, hot door. She didn't know what planet she was on, but she had entered into its orbit accidentally, having no clue about how strong the gravity was or the precise specifications of her stolen spaceship, and now she had suffered the severe consequences.

She had been born yesterday. _Yesterday_. And already she'd died once and lost control of a spaceship in frivolous pursuit of a vanishing time machine. There was no way to track it, no way to track her father, other than fly aimlessly to try and get as far away from Messaline as possible. But she didn't know what this planet was, the escape vessel didn't have fully detailed star charts, didn't have maps, it was just set on a direct course for whatever the closest human colony was, but she had switched off _that_ particular function straight away. She wasn't a human, she didn't want to go to any human colonies, she had wanted to take control for herself. And at any rate, there hadn't actually been enough fuel to get her to the nearest colony. The fuel had been syphoned out of all the ships on Messaline very gradually to make IEDs in the week-long war.

It looked like she was stranded, unless she found a way to repair her ship, and not in the least to fix whatever was wrong with herself after having a crash landing. Glancing down, she saw the skin of her left leg, the outside of her thigh, was a bleeding wound through the tears of her trousers, burnt to oblivion, wounds stretching up over her hip and singing her clothes. Feeling the pain only when she saw it, she limped over to the snow and picked up a handful to pack it over the burns. The relief she felt was momentary until her side became numb from the cold and she figured that she was going to be at risk of frostbite if she stayed out there for longer. The wreckage was hot, the heating system's filament had exploded against her causing her injuries, but it wouldn't be hot forever, and there weren't any spare, thicker clothes inside it.

It looked like Jenny was trapped on a desolate ice planet with no way to escape and no way to survive, because she had no food supplies or weapons at all, and even if she _did_ have weapons, she couldn't see any animals to kill for meat, nor did she have a way to sterilise or skin or cook anything she found. On top of that, she didn't even _know_ how to cook anything, cooking was not one of the important skills implanted into her brain when she had been created less than twenty-four hours ago. The ability to create gourmet cuisine was not there on the list of qualities belonging to the perfect soldier. She was left with no choice but to try and think her way out of things.

Her only option was to merely survive until she could think of something better to do, and survival meant heat primarily. She could do lots of things with heat, she could melt snow and make drinkable water, keep herself warm, keep herself _alive_. But the heating system was gone, exploded, and the fires of the wreck were going out. Her only hope was the engine, the engine produced enormous amounts of heat, heat that needed to be ejected out into space. It was a short-term escape pod, not any actual space vessel of any importance, the mechanisms were all simple. If she could ration the fuel, maybe mix it with snow to try and get more out of it, she could probably disconnect the engines from everything else in the ship and funnel the heat ejectors back into the cockpit. If she did that, she would only have to fix the door back up and she would have a relatively warm place to sit and think.

She staggered, wincing against the pain of her wounds, into the ship and spied a first aid kit, but that could wait for later. What she needed was a toolbox, anything left for general maintenance, hoping that they, too, hadn't been procured by the human or the Hath armies for the war effort. Who could fight with a bunch of screwdrivers, anyway? Apart from her father. Though, she barely knew him, and he had just left her. He hadn't even waited to see if she would wake up. Surely he suspected that she might? It must be something to do with him, she knew it, something to do with these Time Lords, but if he was the last one, like he said, who was there to tell her the specifics of their anatomy?

She found a toolkit finally, and opened it to a glorious assortment of spanners, screws, nuts, bolts and screwdriver; a plain, cold, metal screwdriver, not a weird, glowing one. Sonic one. Was that what he had called it? A sonic screwdriver? She was too cold to remember properly. She stumbled to the outside and found that her route to the engine was covered in snow, that the pod was completely caked in the stuff, the nose buried deep down.

At a loss, she dropped the tools and desperately started trying to shovel the snow with her bare hands. It proved fruitless though - there was so much snow, and her hands were numb after just a few seconds. She was stuck shivering, unable to move her fingers at all and barely scratching the surface of the ship's hull. Even worse, the sun was setting above her. The sky was getting a darker and darker shade of purple, the ice reflecting plum-colour back at her, the snow like grapes, and the moon was minuscule and too far away to give any light. There was no source of light in the toolkit, there was none anywhere.

She collapsed onto her knees and felt like crying. Who knew if she would come back to life again? If she would wake back up, if she died on this planet, in this cold? She was getting colder and colder and colder by the second and dragged herself inside the ship, the door-less ship, as a wind started up outside. She had never been caught in a snowstorm before. It was no warmer within but she kept herself going on the illusion that it was, on the illusion that she was doing the best that she could.

How could she have failed so quickly? She wasn't even a day old. Not a single day. To die twice in the space of a day? To die alone and freezing on an empty planet? She was going to freeze, she was going to develop hypothermia. She was going to be frozen and buried in the snow and even if she did wake up again inexplicably, she wouldn't have a way out.

It was pitch black outside now and she could definitely hear the storm picking up. Jenny wanted to cry at her uselessness; she should have just keep the ship on course for the nearest human colony. There was no reason she wouldn't be allowed onto a human colony. She was born in a human colony. There was no reason why she hadn't stayed on Messaline, either. Running after a man who had let her die for him and then left.

Where had the Doctor been when she had woken up? Where was the Doctor now? Maybe they had a connection, she thought. She was his daughter, maybe he would know that she was going to die, that she needed to be saved by somebody, _anybody_. She felt like praying, but she didn't know who to pray to, she didn't know anything of religion, or gods. The only creation myth she had ever known, her father had proven false. That one shred of hope.

As the light dwindled, Jenny remained alone on the planet, alone with a frost gathering on her lips, eyelashes, eyebrows, her fingertips. She couldn't see if they were going black from frostbite yet in the darkness, she couldn't tell if the darkness was outside of her or inside of her. Maybe she was fading away and her brain was shutting off from the cold.

Regardless of where the darkness came from, she succumbed to it eventually, and fell away from herself.

* * *

 _Arooh, Tungtrun, 27_ _th_ _of July, 6012_

There were grunting noises around her when she awoke in warmth, buried underneath something. For a few seconds, she thought she was dead, permanently dead, but the smells around her were too poignant and mildly unpleasant to be part of the afterlife if it existed. And going by how she hadn't gasped her away back into consciousness in a violent fit of resuming respiratory functions, she hadn't died again, either.

She opened her cold eyes groggily and looked around to see she was in quite a dark place with a lantern hanging from an icy ceiling, tightly packed ice walls around her, and there were people bustling around. Well, maybe not people - she didn't know what they were, but she was quite sure that there were two of them with four arms each, and they were somewhat larger than a human. They were cooking something on a fire, the light a vibrant orange, and she was underneath a heavy blanket that smelt of decay so strongly she was sure it was first of all old, and second of all made of fur. It definitely seemed soft enough to be fur.

One of the things in the room spoke to other upon noticing her staring at them, and she saw that there was a pot like a cauldron over the fire, and she could smell something cooking in it.

"They're awake," one of them said to the other, coming over to her. She didn't know what species this creature was. It had four yellow eyes deeply set into grey, wrinkled skin that shone like scales in the light, and four, long arms with three spindly fingers and two thumbs on each hand. It was also speaking another language to the one she was used to.. She didn't know what language it was, just that she could understand it, and she got the feeling that if she tried to talk, she would succeed in speaking it as well.

"Where am I?" she asked, and it stared at her in surprise that she really _was_ speaking its language. Her mouth moved differently to the words she knew she was saying, and it was strange, but not so strange that she couldn't see it was a benefit.

"No humans know how to speak the native tongue," it said.

"…I'm not a human," she said after a pause. She didn't know what this ability was. Possibly something to do with the things forced into her head by the progenation machine that had created her, because she could always understand the Hath as they addressed one another with their green-bubbled face-tanks, "Who are you? What are you? What planet am I on?"

"Tungtrun," it told her, "We are Trodahz. I am Cardak, this is Ruax."

"I'm Jenny," she said politely, not having any other name to introduce herself with other than the one Donna had given her, "Did you rescue me?"

"We came to examine the wreckage, you've been unconscious for two days," Cardak explained. She didn't know what a Trodahz was, but they were clearly the species who inhabited the planet, living under the surface, by the looks of things, "It caused a cave-in in the reservoir."

"Your water supply!? I am _so_ sorry," she apologised, "Is there anything I can do?" Who knew if the water was contaminated with drops of fuel or burning spaceship now.

"You can tell us what you are," Ruax said from by the fire, stirring whatever was in the pot. When she looked around, it didn't seem as primitive as it first had. Sure, they were cooking over an open fire and lived wrapped in furs, but she could see some sort of technological device on the ceiling that looked to be doing the same job as a simple, household extractor fan, sucking the smoke out. And there were power cables powering the lantern that fed through another hole in the wall, and the door in was made of metal. It was a very odd sort of place.

"I'm… I'm a Time Lord," she said eventually, and they both laughed.

"A Time Lord? The Time Lords are all dead. Your ship log said you came from Messaline," Cardak said.

"You accessed the ship's log? How badly is it damaged? Is it repairable?" she asked urgently. She thought that if she had the parts, she could probably fix it. The parts and some way to live until she got them, then she could figure out exactly what had gone wrong and caused the malfunction that made the heating system blow out, destroying the gravity estimators.

"With the right parts and the right knowledge it is," Cardak answered her.

"Good. Where is it? I need to fix it," Jenny said, trying to get out of the bed she was in and finding her leg bound tightly with bandages, the open first aid kit from the ship lying on the floor next to her. The floor was covered in fur, like a carpet, only not nailed or stapled down, a range of different furs in different colours taken from animals she could scarcely imagine all making a patchwork rug on the floor.

"The parts will be hard to find," Ruax said, "You should rest. You shouldn't have woken up so soon, or healed so quickly."

"Well I just told you, I'm not a human, am I?" she argued, trying to stand up still, "Look, I admire your hospitality, really I do, and if there's anything I can do to help you, I'll try, but I have to find my father, it's important."

"Your father? Another Time Lord?"

"Yes, another Time Lord, the last Time Lord. Apart from me, I mean. The Doctor. Do you know him? Have you heard of him?" Jenny said, and they exchanged a look that might be a look of worry, Cardak standing up from where they had been sat at the edge of the bed to tower two feet above Jenny.

"The Doctor is a myth."

"The Doctor is not a myth, he's my father, he stuck his hand in a progenation machine on Messaline and _I'm_ what came out, then he ran off and left me there because he thought I was dead, can you help me fix my ship or not?"

"…The only place to get those sorts of parts quickly and at a good price is the black market," Ruax answered her finally. She was shivering already, freezing cold. She guessed it was a lot easier for them to live on the planet than it was for her, as she wrapped her arms around her, the burns on her body vanished already.

"Price? What's the currency here? How do I get money?" Jenny asked.

"Working," Cardak answered, "Won't you have something to eat? Some stew?" Food sounded good right then, and she was instantly side tracked from her paternal endeavours, because she could smell the food on the air.

"Why are you being so kind to me?" Jenny asked ten minutes later, sat on a chair by the fire with a blanket around her shoulders, an enormous blanket, meant for other enormous Trodahz like Cardak and Ruax, she supposed, "After I caved in the ceiling of the reservoir?"

"Caving in the reservoir is almost beneficial," Cardak answered, "Usually, people have to go out to the ice fields and bring snow back to put in the geyser that melts it."

"Oh," she said. At least she had done something right in her crash landing.

"Ruax was hoping you might sell the ship for scraps and give us some of the money," Cardak said. Ruax didn't seem pleased at this news being delivered.

"Cardak hoped you might die so that _we_ could sell it and keep _all_ the money," Ruax said to get back at Cardak. Jenny thought they might be married, but she hadn't a clue if either of them had genders. She didn't know much about how genders worked in other species.

"I'll pay you back for whatever trouble you went to, make it up to you," she promised, "I'll get a job here, to get money to fix the ship, I swear."

"If you were born from a progenation machine, how old are you?" Ruax asked. They both stared at her expectantly, and she didn't think they would like the answer she gave them.

"…I suppose I'm about three days old," she answered, to which they were shocked, and she heard them argue between each other for a few moments about how a three-day-old clone was ever going to get a job and make any money on Tungtrun, "I'll make the money I need to. And if I don't, and I _do_ end up dying, you can have the ship and sell it." When she said that, they settled again, because it looked like rescuing her would pay off regardless, since she was making all these agreements. "What's in this stew?"

"Ebreth, Wolt, Kaat, all sorts of the surface creatures," Ruax, who had cooked it, answered. She didn't know what any of those things were, but she thought she had better learn. It didn't look like she would be leaving Tungtrun anytime soon, after all. Who knew how many ship parts she needed? How long it would take to fix? She might even be overestimating herself and she wouldn't be able to fix it. Then she would have to find somebody who could.

"So," she began, "Where's the black market?"

* * *

 _Arooh, Tungtrun, 7_ _th_ _of May, 6014_

Tungtrun only had one city. There were supposed to be villages dotted about here and there, but Jenny had never found any of them in her explorations. The singular city it had was enormous though. In the summer, which was hardly a summer at all by what she thought a summer should be, the trade routes boomed and people came from all around, this being the closest inhabited planet to the edge of the Canis Perilos system. The city was underground and called Arooh, and was made entirely of tunnels and caverns dug into ice and rock. The further down one went, the warmer it was, and the less ice and the more rock one would find. Jenny had been born in tunnels and internal terrariums on Messaline, and now she spent most of her days prowling more tunnels dressed in furs and thick clothes to protect from the cold, because it still wasn't particularly warm even in the warm sections.

It had almost been two years of her life living in Arooh's caves, skulking around in the dark trying to build up enough money to get the parts to fix her spaceship, but it wasn't as easy as that when she was also having to provide for herself, pay rent on the squalid little ice cave that she lived in, and install a rudimentary heating system that was a work of genius. That was why she was still there, stuck, and that was why she was presently in a down-market tavern brandishing a carcass at the bartender trying to get money out of him.

"It's good quality meat, Brund!" she shouted at him over the bar, stood on tiptoes, holding the six-legged Ebreth by its long tail. Orange blood stained its grey fur. It wasn't a peak time, it was only the middle of the afternoon, so he wasn't exactly losing customers by the sight of a tiny blonde human-looking girl waving a dead bit of vermin in a place where they were expected to eat.

"Get that thing outta here," Brund, a Trodahz like her benefactors of two years ago, ordered her gruffly, polishing a dirty glass. Jenny had never seen clean glasses down there, down in The Howling Something. It was The Howling Something, because whatever the howling noun was that came next had been scratched off the sign after a disagreement between Brund and the previous owner long before Jenny had arrived.

"You bought it last week! It's the staple food around here, you can't afford to let it go to waste," Jenny argued, waving the game at him.

"Eat it yourself, then it won't go to waste," he said sharply, and she scoffed. She couldn't eat it herself, it would ruin her stew. She'd been cooking a stew for a week now, and anymore common vermin in it would just ruin the flavours. It was stew for breakfast, lunch and dinner for Jenny, her day-in-day-out meal, and the only thing she ever had to season it with was ice. And then the ice turned into water that tasted of dirt eventually. She dropped the dead Ebreth right on the countertop.

"Take it or leave it," she said coolly, crossing her arms, getting orange blood stains on her clothes as she did.

"Eurgh!" Brund exclaimed, and he swatted the thing so that it fell off the bar and back into Jenny's arms when she ducked to reflexively grab it again, "I'll take it, but I won't pay you for it."

"Then what was the point of me going and killing it to begin with?"

"I keep telling you, all anybody wants to eat these days is Roran," Brund told her sharply, "That's all anybody cares about, these tourists. They like the furs."

"What's wrong with Ebreth furs? Some of the furs I'm wearing right now are Ebreth furs," Jenny argued, pointing out the gauntlet on her left arm, made of dilapidated grey skin.

"Not blue enough."

"I'll dye it blue."

"Dye it blue and stick horns on it and I'll pass it off as a baby Roran and see if I can't get a fair amount of credits for it," Brund shrugged. Jenny glared, and made to cart the stupid carcass out of The Howling Something right then and there, turning on her heels and holding it at her side just high enough that its head didn't thwack above the floor, when somebody addressed her.

"Hey, I'll buy it off you," they said, and she turned around to see somebody sliding out of a barstool that had previously been stuck in the shadows. A man, tall, young, light brown hair, a face that made you want to trust him and warm eyes to match.

"How much?" she said instantly. By that point, she'd take anything to get rid of the Ebreth.

"A hundred."

"A hundred what? Credits? _A hundred credits_? For this thing?" she questioned, holding the Ebreth up again at this newcomer's face. He wasn't from Arooh anymore than she was, and he flinched away from it. She'd bet _two_ -hundred credits that he didn't have a single idea what to do with a piece of meat like that, or where all the best parts were to eat, or even how to skin it. He didn't look the type. Then again, _she_ didn't look the type, either.

"Sure thing," he said, flashing a credit stick at her with three digits, a one and two zeroes exactly as proclaimed, flashing up amber on it. Well, Ebreths were so common it was barely even a risk taking a hundred whole credits off of a stranger. She snatched the stick and held out the Ebreth right to him, and he took it and stared at it.

"What are you gonna do with it?" Brund asked him, "Eat it? You don't even know what it is, pretty boy."

"I presume it's edible or she wouldn't be trying to sell it here," he said, then he turned back to Jenny, "What's a human doing in a place like this?"

" _You're_ the only human here," she told him.

"Oh yeah? What're you, then?"

"She's been here for two years and she claims she's a Time Lord," Brund said. Jenny told everybody she met that she was a lost Time Lord, the lost daughter of the Doctor, the only one left, and not once had she ever been believed. Nobody had the equipment to scan her, nobody had even the smallest stethoscope to check her two heartbeats, but they were there sure enough. She could hear them at night when everything else was quiet.

"I _am_ one," Jenny snapped.

"You?" the mystery man asked incredulously, like she was some confused kid who'd just told him she lived on the moon.

"Yep."

"How old are you?" he asked, and Brund snorted.

"What's it to you? That's a personal question," she said defensively. She never knew what to say when people asked her that. She would always either lie and say she was in her twenties, or she would tell them the truth, that she wasn't even two, and she'd get laughed at. Well, she usually got laughed at. They expected her to say she was centuries old, or something. That was what she thought, anyway. She didn't know a lot about Time Lords. Her father had never had the chance to tell her much more than the name and the two-hearts-thing.

"I'm a Time Agent," he answered her. That explained the smoothness of his accent and how out of place he seemed, he really _was_ out of place.

"The Time Agency died a thousand years ago," Jenny told him. She read every book in Arooh she could get her hands on, and some of them were ancient human relics that told of institutions like the Time Agency. Suffice it to say, Jenny had been interested in those tomes to a serious degree.

"He's a con artist, ignore him, he'll scam you," Brund told her.

"Would you shut up? He's the only person around here who's ever given me a decent sum of money for anything I've ever killed on the surface. I don't see _you_ risking your neck going up there," Jenny said to him angrily, to which he responded he didn't even have a neck, and she said it was just a saying. Then the mysterious man asked her where she'd picked it up from, it was a very old human saying, and she lied and said she didn't know. She wasn't going to be sticking around The Howling Something talking about her origins for much longer, at this rate. "You'd go out of business if it wasn't for me, you know I'm the cleanest, sharpest shot in this whole city."

"Oh yeah?" the Time Agent asked her, "Can you do anything other than shoot good?"

"I don't shoot _good_ , I shoot _exceptionally_ ," Jenny said, "I've never missed a target in my whole life." Not that he knew how long Jenny's whole life was, but he seemed interested now, more so than he had been before, even.

"Could I talk to you somewhere more private?" he asked, and she was taken aback. Maybe he was _kind_ of a 'pretty boy'… He just smiled.

"Uh…"

"He's scamming you, Jenny," Brund advised her, and she clenched her jaw and looked around and glared at him.

"Whoever buys the Ebreth gets the girl," she told him, "And _he_ bought the Ebreth, and after eating the slop you cook up in here I'm sure he's dying for a proper meal on this godforsaken snowball." God, she wanted to leave so badly. She was so sick of Tungtrun and its freezing atmosphere right then.

"And by 'proper meal' you mean a bowl of that stew you've been brewing for six months?"

"This is a new stew, actually, you know that after I gave you what was left of it, it's only been on for a week," she said. There was absolutely nothing wrong with slow-boiling meat to the point of juicy disintegration, Jenny thought, and she turned on her heels and dragged the Time Agent out of The Howling Something by his upper-arm, letting him go immediately upon their exiting of the building.

"You've been cooking stew for a week?" the Time Agent asked.

"It's great stew," she said defensively, "You'll see."

"Are you taking me to your house?" he frowned.

"It's not so much a house, more a cave, but it's the warmest place in all of Arooh, I have a rudimentary heating system," she explained to him, him following just behind her. They must have looked strange, a pair of 'humans' wandering about, him trailing along while being a great deal taller, "Who are you, then? A Time Agent? What's your name? Why are you here?"

"Here on business, of course," he said, "My name's Emmett, Emmett DeLacey."

"Ugh, surnames, I wish I had one," she said wistfully, "Especially one like 'DeLacey.'" Emmett DeLacey laughed.

"You're just Jenny, then?" he said, "Jenny Nobody?"

"Well, I guess I am," she said, "I've never found a name I liked enough to take yet. What's a Time Agent doing on Tungtrun? There's nothing here, it's an ice desert, trust me."

"Why're _you_ still here, then, Time Lord?" he toyed. Maybe he really _was_ quite cute, the more she looked at him.

"I'm stuck, no way off," she said, "I crashed here in July of 6012 and wrecked a shuttle I stole from Messaline, you know Messaline?"

"Neighbouring planet, renowned for its clone war," he said.

"Yeah, that. Clone war. I've been trying to fix it for nearly two years, stuck down here trying to buy any spare ship parts that float into the black market," she said.

"What a coincidence, I'm here for the black market, too," he told her. The streets of Arooh were just tunnels, and they always seemed to be empty. There wasn't a rush hour, there was barely night and day. There were no schools, every youngster was taught at home, and mainly taught survival. It was a grim place, a squalid hovel that she wished to escape from as soon as she was able. Maybe one day she'd live to be as old as the Doctor had been alluded to be by those girls he'd been with, but over ninety-nine percent of her life had been spent in ice tunnels. She might as well be a Tungtrun native.

"How come?"

"Can't speak about it out in the open, I'm meant to be working undercover," he said.

"Half the people won't even believe you're a Time Agent coming all the way out here," she told him, and he shushed her, but she got the feeling he was only kidding about the need to be quiet. Nevertheless, they didn't talk about anything at all as she took him through half-streets and over rocky passages to get to the dismal cave she had to call 'home', a cave half taken up by her spaceship, the large chair of which she had been using as Tungtrun's Most Uncomfortable Bed for the last twenty months.

"There aren't any chairs," Emmett DeLacey commented, staring around.

"Sit on the table or something," Jenny shrugged. Everything she did she did inside the cover of the spaceship. It had been an almighty task trying to get it down there in the first place, she remembered vividly, "I never thought it was necessary to buy chairs, not when I can't take them with me when I go." Every inch of Jenny's home was full of furs, furs to keep the warmth in, furs she wore for clothes, fur blankets, fur everything made from every animal she could grab on the surface and every critter she chopped up for stew. Stew which she ladled into her singular bowl (she was not hungry) and gave to Emmett, who looked at it regretfully. "It doesn't taste nearly as bad as it looks. Honestly, that's the best thing you'll find to eat on this entire planet."

"What a dismal place," he told her, "Are you really a Time Lord?"

"Of course I am."

"The Time Agency have it recorded that all the Time Lords are dead but one, are you that one?" he inquired, and she didn't answer, because she knew she was not, "The Doctor?"

"My father," she said, and he frowned.

"Then… you're not a _real_ Time Lord?"

"I'm plenty real."

"How were you born?"

Jenny paused for the longest while and resolved that Emmett probably held some way to get her off Tungtrun, and she might as well tell him a truth she'd grown to be almost ashamed of.

"Progenation machine on Messaline," she said, "That clone war you were talking about. I'm one of the clones, just a Time Lord clone."

"Do you… you know… regenerate? I've heard that Time Lords can regenerate," Emmett said.

"Do I what?"

"They change their faces, that's what the Time Agency says. They die, then they come back and look different," he explained. More information than she'd gotten out of the Doctor in the handful of hours she'd actually known him. She stared off into the middle distance pondering this.

" _That's_ what happened…" she breathed, mostly to herself.

"How old are you, again?"

"Not even two yet," she confessed, "Sorry if you were expecting somebody more seasoned. What's this black market business, then? Why are you here? Were you after my help?" He looked her over in an odd way for a few seconds, like he was sizing her up, but not in a perverse way; as though she were some weapon and he was deciding how lethal she might be. "I mean, I _was_ genetically conditioned to be a soldier, and thanks to my Time Lord DNA from my father, I'm basically a super-soldier."

"There's a freighter docked on this planet and its cargo is in the black market awaiting transportation, its cargo being some rare Krixes," he began. There was a pause.

"…What's a Krix?" she asked.

"Dangerous. Huge killing machines, lots of teeth and tentacles. They're planning to use them as weapons. They're also endangered and stolen, and I've been assigned to recover them because of some information someone leaked to the Time Agency."

"How did somebody leak information to an organisation that went bust a thousand years ago?" she asked, wondering if that was too much of a spoiler for Emmett's future or not. She didn't know what his future was or what she was and wasn't supposed to say. She wished she wasn't so naïve sometimes, "I didn't think that was the sort of thing you lot dealt with. Do you know anything else about Time Lords?"

"The Agency knows lots about them, I'd be happy to tell you if you help me get these Krixes back. All we have to do is commandeer the ship they're on. But it's a one-way trip, no coming back to Tungtrun once aboard, just flying off until I can get us to the pickup point a thousand miles out of the system. And it's not what we deal with, but it turns out that there's a dissenter who's trying to use the Krixes to cause chaos."

"Mutiny in the ranks?" she asked wryly, but he didn't find it amusing. She supposed he was quite loyal to the Time Agency. Maybe _she_ could become a Time Agent? A Time Lord working for the Time Agency – what better way to live? She could get her hands on a time machine, any kind of transportation, if she did that. She could go _anywhere_ , and do what Donna said the Doctor did, and she could find him. "I can help you get them back."

"They might need to be killed," he said.

"But you said they were rare."

"Sentient lives come first." He ate some more of the stew then, and she continued to have her little fantasises about what she might do with the ability to travel through time like her father did, now that it seemed like less of a pipe dream. Two whole years nearly she had been without him, maybe she wouldn't have to do that for much longer? He couldn't be _that_ hard to find…

"I could kill them if needs be," she offered finally, when it seemed that was what he had been waiting for. She clenched her fists. She didn't want to kill them if they were rare, she'd rather transport them. But if it came down to it, it was a kill or be-killed world out there in space. She'd do anything to find the Doctor.

"I can see that, you've already killed plenty down here," he waved a hand at the dozens of furs hanging around the room. True enough, "And you know your way around here, I assume?" She nodded.

"If you get me off this planet," she bargained, "I'll help you get these Krixes."

"Deal, Jenny Nobody. And this stew really _is_ better than it looks…"

* * *

The way ships docked into Arooh was through an impossibly vast cenote which burrowed down through ice and rock for miles to reach the warmer layers, and accordingly the layer where the black market was situated. There was a major issue with snow coming in down it whenever a ship had to land during a blizzard and the basic forcefield was retracted for a few minutes, and a nasty breeze sometimes came through. She spent a lot of her days down this particular hole looking for spare spaceship parts for her Messaline shuttle, but rarely did she find anything. Sometimes there would be something she could nowhere near afford but also wasn't worth the risk of stealing, and then she would get herself in a sorry mood for a few days and would spend more time hunting on the surface than usual.

At the bottom of this cenote it bloated into a rocky belly which had become an aircraft hangar for all the ships coming and going over the years. Lately it had become overrun with tourists and supply ships on stops on their way to Messaline which, Jenny heard, was flourishing quite well as the new Eden of Canis Perilo. As wonderful as the luscious forests and jungles created by the Source two years ago sounded by comparison to the hovel of Arooh buried five miles below a harsh, arctic tundra, she was not inclined to return to her place of death. Not yet, anyway. No, there was no way she would go back there until after she found the Doctor.

"Who're we looking for, then?" Jenny asked Emmett, who walked about like he owned the place, like he were some sort of king. She suddenly felt very naïve and almost innocent by his side, a follower, as though it wasn't her who was guiding them through the squalor of Arooh, "Do they know you? Your face?"

"No, of course not," Emmett told her. He talked to her like she was a child now that he knew her age. When she had left Messaline, left its warzone and thus slipped away from the purpose which had been assigned to her by the progenation machine, she had lost most of the attitude that she was not a baby. She had said it to her father, all she knew was " _how to fight, and how to die_." Here she was on Tungtrun, never fighting anything more than whatever beast she was stalking to shoot with her souped-up crossbow (and that never amounted to fighting because they were usually dead before they even knew she was there), and doing everything in her power to stay alive. Dying, once upon a time, she had seen as honourable. But it had been anything but. It had cost her a family and a life so much more extraordinary than this.

"Who is it, though? Who has the Krixes?"

"I don't know them, I only know the ship, a freighter. You know what a freighter looks like, don't you?" he said.

"I don't really like being patronised, Emmett," she told him finally, "And yes, I do know what a freighter looks like." She did. She was not an imbecile. Freighters were medium-sized, long and deep with room for plenty of cargo. They always had the most trouble navigating into Arooh's cenote. Eight months ago, one of them had crashed and the entire tunnel had needed to be hastily reconstructed. There had nearly been a famine as a result. So, yes, she knew exactly what a freighter looked like.

They left huts and stalls and caves where shady shops were built, wending betwixt the illegal products – drugs, weapons, the usual – to creep into the aircraft bay itself. Well, it wasn't creeping, so much. She doubted that until they started trying to get on board this ship, they wouldn't be questioned at all by anybody.

"Sorry," Emmett apologised, "It's just… there's only so much you can learn from things being uploaded into your brain."

"What are you saying? I should just _choose_ to be older?" she challenged him, and he stopped walking for a second and looked at her.

"…That isn't what I meant," he said.

"Look, _I'm_ not a liability here, and _I'm_ going to try my best to help you with this because I'd really like to get off this planet, and it doesn't look like my ship is going to be fixed any time _ever_. I'll do anything to find my father," she told him firmly. Still, she thought she sounded like a child. A child justifying to their parents why they ought to drive them to their first party, or a child justifying to their father the particulars of war and military service.

Emmett didn't really say anything more, and Jenny got in quite a huffy mood as they continued through the cavernous hangar together. There were various other humans or human-looking people down there, and she wondered how many of them were actually clones from the war on Messaline she had just never met in her first day of life. Some of these people might be less than two years old, as well, play-acting in a world full of 'grown-ups.' But she was not a human, and she didn't think it would be worth her time to hang around with washed-up, infantile soldiers, the remnants of an old war which hadn't found a use for them afterwards. Did they still use the progenation machines, she wondered?

There were not _just_ humans, though. Humans were in a great minority by comparison to non-humans, and especially the native Trodahz. And then they walked past over a dozen other species littered about in droves, only half of which Jenny could name. A lot she had seen before, but didn't know anything about them. She found that people didn't really like getting interrupted and asked intrusive questions by a nosey 'human' girl when they were just trying to go about their often illegal business. Months ago, she had stopped asking. Sometimes she would ask Brund if there was anybody particularly noteworthy in The Howling Something on one of the rare nights she was there during happy hour.

Emmett shivered and crossed his arms around himself.

"Cold?" she asked wryly, "Should've borrowed those furs from me like I suggested. _I'm_ plenty warm."

"I bet you are," he said in a tone of voice she could not place. She faltered in her steps, which Emmett didn't notice, and had to clench her jaw and catch him back up again. What did _that_ mean? What did his _tone_ mean? Strictly speaking, it wasn't true that she couldn't place how he sounded. Oh, she could. She just didn't want to. Or maybe she did… she didn't know. She didn't know him or herself, and she was getting much too worked up about a four-word comment from a boy whose time period was ancient history and was only semi-cute. Emmett stopped and Jenny nearly walked into him. "It's that one."

"What's what one?"

"The freighter," he explained, nodding his head. She frowned. "The one we came here looking for..?"

"Oh, _that_ freight..? Yep, sure. Okay. That one. Gotcha," she smiled brightly and then turned to actually look at the ship. It wasn't very interesting. It had one of those gang symbols painted on the side, but the transient criminals who drifted in and out of Arooh's docks had never been something she paid attention to. It was probably dangerous, she admitted, and she didn't _really_ want intergalactic space smugglers to be after her, but this was her best shot to get off Tungtrun and travel the stars, and if she was going through time, they'd never find her. The freighter was nothing more than an old grey lump of metal. Though, it was _quite_ big. She wondered where it was supposed to be heading.

"Do you have any weapons apart from that crossbow?" Emmett asked her.

"Why would I need another weapon? If you wanted me to use a different weapon, you should have said before we left so I could've grabbed my longbow," she told him.

"I was thinking something a little less… acoustic?" he suggested.

" _Acoustic_?"

Emmett sighed and reached into his coat and, to Jenny's great shock, pulled out a handgun. Well, it was more of a blaster, judging from the shape of the ammo cartridges she saw when he pulled out two of _those_ from his pockets as well.

"Do you know how to shoot that?"

"Of course I do," she muttered, taking it and loading it immediately. She preferred her crossbow. It was quieter, more deadly, and the bolts could be recycled. You could not recycle laser-charged energy blasts.

"Good, because you'll probably need to use it," Emmett said, taking her arm and pulling her into a secluded shady corner. Then he stooped a little so that he could speak to her better, and she couldn't make up her mind about whether that was patronising (again) or sweet. Not that that mattered, she thought hastily. Why would she care if he was being sweet? She didn't, obviously…

"What's the plan, then?" she asked him, "How are we going to commandeer the ship?"

"Some of my fellow Time Agents are known to be a little, uh, brash, see," he explained, "They kind of go in, guns blazing, all that-"

"I've heard stories," she told him.

"Well, I'm not really like that. I have handcuffs. We'll have to sneak. Sneak into the cockpit and lock it off from the rest of the ship," he told her, "Then the Agency can arrest the criminals."

"Wow, that is so much less gung-ho than I was expecting," she said, "And, what happens if the other people on the ship sabotage it? Cut off the engines? Cut off the power?"

"Then they'll have to be eliminated. And they wouldn't risk doing something like that with the Krixes on board, as long as they don't find out who we work for. Well, who _I_ work for, and what my aim is," Emmett explained, "But, you know, try to kill as few people as possible, alright?"

"What do you think I am, a trigger-happy murderer? I kill animals for resources, not for fun. Of course I'll keep fatalities to a minimum," she said.

"Good. I just don't want you to end up being like your father," Emmett said. He said 'your father' with a note of incredulity still, but she was used to it, so she ignored it, because the words he had said were more perplexing than his inflection.

"Like my father..? What do you mean 'like my father'? My father's a pacifist," she told Emmett as he began to walk off, her trailing after him, "He taught… he taught me that killing's wrong."

"A pacifist?" Emmett stared at her, "Is that what he told you?"

"Yes," she answered firmly, through gritted teeth.

"He has the blood of millions on his hands," Emmett told her, and she felt like she had been slapped. Emmett was walking off again, and she couldn't do anything but follow. She couldn't stop thinking about what he said, though. The blood of millions? The Doctor? The Doctor who told her that there was always a choice? Always a way to avoid people dying? She knew that he hadn't even avenged her, hadn't killed Cobb when she jumped in front of the bullet. She did not know the particulars, she hadn't exactly been aware, but she knew that when she had left Messaline he had definitely been alive.

Jenny resolved that when she saw the Doctor, she would ask him. There was no point in getting her information second hand, and he _was_ her father. Explanations like that, she thought, were owed to her. For him leaving. It was the least he could do.

They crept through the cavern now, the sounds of engines and chatter in the cold air, to sneak around the outskirts and discreetly get around to the other side of the freighter where the door was. However, getting in that way was a challenge in and of itself. No doubt there would be people crawling all around inside of it, guards and criminals. The entrance was no exception, just a ladder hanging down because the doors to the loading bay, presumably where their valuable cargo was stored, were locked up tight. But it would be impossible to get inside without attracting the attention of round about a dozen people. They crouched behind some boxes that smelled like they were full of low-quality cured meats. Or, she should say, meats in the process of being cured.

"How do we get in?" Jenny whispered, "There's at least ten people just outside, we'll never get on board."

"Well not by walking, sure," Emmett said, pulling up the sleeve of his coat and revealing some small device with silver buttons held together by a leather wrist strap.

"What's _that_?" she asked, in awe.

"This? It's a vortex manipulator, standard issue. I thought you knew about the Time Agency?" he asked her, "How do you think we travel around through time?"

"With a spaceship, or a big machine – but _that_? That's what lets you travel? Travel anywhere, in the whole universe? All of time and space?" Jenny gawped at it.

"Uh-huh," he assured her with a smile, though he was a little distant. He had cleaner teeth than anybody she had ever seen on Tungtrun, including herself. Truthfully, she didn't have the best hygiene regimen. She probably smelt. It wasn't too easy washing on an ice planet with no proper plumbing, waste disposal was a bad enough issue without adding daily personal washes into the mix.

"Well – what are you going to do with it?" she asked him.

"Get us on board," he told her.

"What? Just like that? That easily?" she frowned.

"Don't count your blessings yet, Jenny Nobody," he told her, pushing the buttons on his wrist gizmo. Then he grabbed hold of her hand and she was wrenched forcefully out of space. For a split second, it felt like every muscle in her body was on fire and every joint was dislocated, her eyes burning with a bright blue light. But the light vanished and left a stain in her peripheral vision and she gasped for air and collapsed against a wall in a much darker environment, still feeling the warmth of Emmett's hand in hers. "Was that your first teleport?" he asked with a grin, dropping her hand.

"That's a bumpy ride," she coughed. She could taste blood. And her hand was tingling, but she didn't know if that was to do with the teleport or to do with Emmett. She'd never been inside a spaceship any bigger than her Messaline shuttle before – she wondered if this was anything like her father's ship? She'd never seen it. She couldn't even remember what its name was now. "What do we do now?"

"Go to the cockpit, fly away," Emmett shrugged, "Get to the drop-point a thousand miles out of Canis Perilos. Then, you know, you're… free to go on your way." He started to walk off to the right, in the dark ship's hull. Nobody knew they were there. With her crossbow slung over her back, she reached for the loaded pistol Emmett had just given her she had stuck in her belt as a precaution, holding it loosely in her right hand. She would make every shot count; she always did.

Emmett, who knew his way around, led Jenny and her naïve self through low-ceilinged, narrow hallways, not designed for the transportation of large monsters, she was sure. Her eyes followed his arm, trailed along it repeatedly to the vortex manipulator on his wrist. Wouldn't it be easy to just take it? She could shoot Emmett. She could knock him out. She could probably even wrangle it off him in a fight. Then she would be free, free to go anywhere in the universe, do anything at all. Save planets and people and stars – she didn't know anything about Emmett DeLacey, didn't know that, as unwilling as he presently seemed, he might not just kill her and fly away. Who knew how many of these 'regenerations' she could pull off? Maybe it really would be in her best, most selfish interests to steal the time machine and travel the stars on her own?

Then again, joining the Time Agency? That was just as romantic as a solo career, and she knew that before they were disbanded they had great resources. Resources enough to find the Doctor, maybe? To help her? Really, though, it wasn't even a dilemma. She knew that she would help Emmett, regardless. Unless she was blatantly double-crossed, she wouldn't really even entertain the idea of stealing something so valuable from him, not when he had already promised her passage off Tungtrun. Not when he was already making good on that deal. While she might not have any reason to trust Emmett, she didn't have a reason to distrust him, either. He didn't exactly strike her as the lying, confrontation type, anyway. Had he not bought the Ebreth off her for a hundred credits because… well, she didn't know because. Why _had_ he? She had yet to even do anything useful. All she did was ask him a bajillion questions.

"Do you know how to fly a ship?" Emmett asked.

"Uh… I don't really know, exactly… I mean, it can't be… not _that_ hard, can it? I know basics. I think," she confessed, then her tone turned urgent, "Why? Do you not know how to fly it, or something?" Emmett laughed.

"I'll tell you what to do," he promised. Again, she thought, why had he brought her? She tightened her grip on her gun.

"This seems too easy…"

"What were you expecting?"

"I don't know, a gunfight? Drama? Running? The daring rescue of the Krixes? Not just… just teleporting. It feels like cheating," she said.

"Hey, it's not a game, this is your life," he told her, "Even if you _can_ come back. Someone kills you and you wake up here, they're just gonna keep killing you. You can't put a price on safety."

"You're a Time Agent telling me about _safety_? Your entire life is unsafe."

"So is a soldier's, but you wouldn't expect a soldier to disobey orders or not hold their weapon correctly. Overload a pulse gun," he said, "You still have to be careful, don't you?"

"Careful. Right. And, being careful, that would probably include not offering places on spaceships to girls you don't know anything about, wouldn't it? Picking up liabilities? For all you know, I could be a seasoned liar," she told him, following at his heels like a dog as they walked slowly and listened out for voices. She heard none, though, so if she heard none, chances were Emmett heard none. She had better hearing than an average human.

"At the Time Agency, they teach you to tell when people lie," Emmett said.

"Do they?" she was awestruck, "How do they do that? Could you teach me how to tell? People are always trying to lie to me." He laughed.

"Sure I could teach you."

"But, why?" she inquired, "Why are you doing this for me? I'm not really doing anything for you, and here you are _rescuing_ me?" Emmett sighed.

"You seem lost. You want to find your father. I saw that ship, you won't be getting off Tungtrun anytime soon without somebody's assistance. Why shouldn't I help?" he challenged her, "Why can't I save you for the sake of saving you? And you never know when you might need the help of a sharpshooter. I'm doing a good deed."

"I believe you," she assured him. She believed most things she was told. She didn't quite see why people would have the desire to lie to her, or to lie to anybody – what was so wrong with the truth? If telling the truth got somebody into trouble, well then, maybe they shouldn't have done whatever they needed to lie about to begin with. If people were just good, there would be no reason for subterfuge or dishonesty, or any upset, _ever_. If people were good, she would not have been shot. Although, if _she_ wasn't good, she might not have jumped in front of the bullet. She had healed, so would her father. And they would be together.

Jenny always had things like this rolling around in her head. These borderline philosophical questions, these issues of self-discovery, of the fact that without a war to fight she was nothing, she just drifted from one campaign, one plight, to another. Hunting for food, following Emmett, and the greater one – finding her father. She had intelligence, but she didn't have knowledge. She craved it, but had nowhere to get it, so she felt hollow. She was an empty husk and she didn't know who she was supposed to be to fill that void of personality up. Maybe all Jenny was was a girl trying to find her dad, a lost child. But if she never found him, what would happen to her? Would she have wasted her life?

"Shh," Emmett hissed at her, stopping in the corridor. She hadn't been speaking, she had been questioning herself. For almost two years all she had done was question herself. Emmett held out an arm and kept Jenny back, and she drew her gun and held it tightly. Was she going to have to shoot someone? She had never shot someone. She had shot _at_ people, she had been willing to kill people, but now? Now she knew what dying was like? How it was just empty? How could she _knowingly_ send somebody into that emptiness, forever? A cessation of life like that was… well, it couldn't be carried out on a whim. It had to be justified, the only option.

There were people, though. There were definitely people. They could hear them, around the corner to the left, talking.

"…ain't enough, when you think about how much those things eat," a male voice said.

"Who cares? It's not our problem," a second man said, slightly gruffer, older sounding. The first was much younger, "I'm just a merc, and you're just an engineer." They were coming Jenny and Emmett's way, and there was no other hallway for them to continue on down. They _had_ to turn and meet them, it was inevitable. But she didn't know them, didn't know their crimes, maybe neither of them had ever hurt anyone? How could she let herself have the power over life and death – what gave her that right?

Emmett stepped out and held up his gun. Jenny, in the middle of a minor crisis, followed suit, holding her own gun up. She did not shake, she gave nothing away about the turmoil in her head. The one on the left was the older one, the one on the right was a fresh-faced boy.

"Drop any weapons you might be carrying," Emmett ordered, "Or I'll shoot."

"You'll _shoot_? Who the hell are you?" the older one questioned. The younger one, however, was not nearly as cocky about being confronted in a freighter by unknown gunslingers.

"I'm with the Time Agency, hand over your weapons, I'm commandeering this ship," Emmett said.

"The _Time Agency_? That ancient clique?" the older one gave a guffaw which turned into a hacking cough. The younger one was panicking. Then the older one, while he feigned falling into the wall on his right and clutching his side, drew out a gun of his own and aimed it right at _Jenny_. "Who's your pretty friend, Time Agent? She one of you as well?"

"No," was all Emmett said, pointing his own gun right at the older one's head. It was a standoff. Jenny held her gun forwards, but didn't point it. Emmett frowned at her for this behaviour when he looked her way. She could kill an animal, no problem, for meat and fur, but a person? Someone sentient? Aware?

"What's say I shoot you and take your friend and hide her away in my quarters, huh? She doesn't look like she could put up much of a fight," he said smugly. Well. Now, she thought, maybe she _could_ kill him. Anyone who spoke like _that_ about abusing a woman had probably done it before.

"Just drop your weapon," Emmett ordered him.

"Give me the girl and I'll think about it."

"Nobody is having the girl," Jenny said through gritted teeth, "Just do what he says."

"No," the older man smirked and then cocked his gun. He wasn't the talking type, he was a smarmy rapist and a mercenary for hire and they were unthreatening-looking trespassers. He had a job to do. He went to pull the trigger. Emmett, however, was quicker on the uptake. Emmett put a bullet in his brain and blasted his skull out behind him before he could shoot either of them. His eyes turned white and he fell to the ground, and the younger boy whimpered.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot!" he protested.

"Drop your weapons," Emmett ordered. He wasn't happy about killing the old man. Jenny wasn't happy about it either – though, it was a cruel relief that he wasn't threatening to violate her anymore.

"Sure, sure! I'll do it, I'll do it, don't shoot me," he whined, looking like he might cry. He drew a gun out of his pocket and held it by its barrel, stepping closer and lowering it to the ground right at Emmett's feet. Emmett seemed to have the same flaw that Jenny did, though. The same flaw that had led him to pick her up and make her promises to begin with. He was too trusting. He didn't like the brash methods the Time Agents were known for, and somehow, this sobbing boy who wasn't even older than Jenny's appearance made her look got the drop on him.

The boy dropped his own gun on the ground, leaning close to the pair of them, but then he made a lunge for Emmett's hand and grabbed the gun right out of it. Luckily, he wasn't trained to fire. Probably one of those boys who thought they were hot stuff and cockily went out into the criminal underworld without being born into it, and then ended up miles out of their depth in deep space because nobody willing to do these jobs was expendable enough to turn down. Even if they were idiots. He was a bad shot, was what she was getting at, but it wasn't Emmett he went for. Most likely because Jenny still had a gun, _she_ was the one he shot it. But he flailed when he pulled the trigger and shot her through the flesh on the back of her right leg.

While she stumbled over in pain and was caught in Emmett DeLacey's willing arms, the boy picked up both of the fallen guns – his own, and that of his cohort – and ran off down the hallway. Emmett grabbed Jenny's gun out of her hand and shot at the boy onehandedly and got him in the ankle, but he was gone around the corner, even if she _did_ hear him shriek in anguish.

"What do we do!? Do we go after – _gah_ ," she made an involuntary noise of pain and winced. Her leg was bleeding. It wouldn't bleed for long, Emmett's gun was a laser blaster. Laser wounds practically sutured themselves. It just needed some dressing shoved into it – it went all the way through her soft tissue. She knew it hadn't hit bone, just a flesh wound.

"C'mon," Emmett, helping her, said, "That door right there's the cockpit. Are you any good with computers? They've never been my strong point. Hit that button there." She was on the right, and she reached over and hit quite aggressively a button lit up yellow. Red meant locked, yellow meant unlocked, green meant open. The light turned green, the door slid open, and they were in what was most definitely _not_ a cockpit.

"This is a bridge," she told him, "Not a cockpit, cockpits are on fighters and shuttles."

"See? You are being useful, teaching me semantics." Lucky for them it was empty. He helped her to the nearest chair, and then he went and shot open a box containing wiring sitting on the wall to the right of the door. Closing the door, he cut one of the wires. The yellow door light went off completely, "You see that? The mechanism's destroyed. Nobody can get in, even the captain with a skeleton key."

"So how do _we_ get _out_?" she questioned, wincing at the pain in her leg. She stared around and spotted another, very similar box, on the wall across the room, but it had a red plus drawn on it, "That box over there is first aid," she pointed for Emmett's benefit, pulling off one of her boots and rolling up the heavy fabric of her trousers, already dark and damp with her blood. Emmett did as she instructed.

"We have to hoof it," he told her.

"We have to what?"

"Go faster, on the double," he explained himself, elbowing the lock of the first aid box so that it opened and carrying the entire contents of it over to her, "What if it gets infected from those furs?"

"I, uh… I don't know. I don't know, alright? Don't _you_ know? Do they teach you first aid?" she questioned him, frustrated, "I'm doing the best I can, it'll be fine." Jenny hurt her jaw when she bit down on it to suppress the stinging pain when she had to stuff the wound in her leg full of cotton wool and gauze to soak up the blood, and she wrapped bandages around herself a second later so tight that she was probably going to cut off circulation in her foot.

"That kid, he'll have told the other smugglers we're in here," he said, going over to one of the computer consoles nearby. There were two of them, curved around. She sat at the one on the right, him on the left. In the centre of the room was the captain's chair, but further in front of that was a much larger chair she knew belonged to the pilot. But the two of them didn't have a pilot. Emmett was switching computers on. Jenny copied him. "That one is basic systems. You have to lock all the doors, alright? On the entire ship, put it into emergency lockdown."

"What's your one?"

"Functionality. Control of the engines, management of the power supply, stuff like that. I turn on the engines here, you lock the doors there, then… then one of us has to fly this ship away," he said.

"But you know how to fly it, right!?" she asked in a panic. _Be careful what you wish for_ , she thought to herself, annoyed that she had previously been wishing for more excitement. Now smugglers were going to try and break in, and she had been shot in the leg.

"I – sort of? I mean, I'm improvising. This was supposed to be an easy job. We should've gone for sabotage, killed the Krixes and then got the hell off the planet with the VM," Emmett said.

"Couldn't we still do that? You could switch off oxygen in the hold? Increase the heat? Decrease?" she suggested. Her leg smarted.

"That's probably what they wanted me to do, didn't think I could do this. This is part of why I wanted you to come, I thought you might be able to help – you flew that shuttle, right? This is easier."

"This freighter is massive! _How_ is it easier!?"

"It's slower, there's autopilot, the trajectories are less complicated, VI takes care of most of the functions? You plot a course and it goes – are you locking down the doors? They can get blowtorches out of the hold and break through the steel."

"They can _what_!?" she shouted at him, glancing at the door like the torches were already working their way through the metal.

"They only asked me to do this one because I messed up on my last assignment…" he said, more to himself. Jenny was trying to multitask in putting the ship onto emergency lockdown.

"I don't know how to lock it down without it shutting off the engines and going to drift, you have to hurry up first so I can trick the system into thinking there's been, a, uh… a hull breach. Then it'll shut the doors, if it thinks the oxygen is being depleted, but I don't…. I don't know how… I can't… I don't know enough about programming to trick it into thinking there's an emergency!" she shouted at him fervently.

"Then make an emergency," he told her.

" _What?_ "

"Reroute all the oxygen supply to the bridge," Emmett ordered her.

"But everybody else will suffocate," she told him.

"Just do it!"

"They'll _die_!"

"They might not, there's a lot of air circulating out there, and emergency reserve tanks," he said.

"If I lock all the doors nobody can get to the reserve tanks, you can't pick and choose with a lockdown, Emmett! It's all the doors, or none."

"We only have to get a thousand miles out of Canis Perilos, it won't take long. We can figure it out later – maybe I'll be able to hack it, just cut off the oxygen so that the ship thinks there's an emergency and goes into lockdown! Do it now! You don't want to be a liability, do you!?"

"I don't want blood on my hands!"

" _Do it_!"

Jenny finally listened. She did cut off the oxygen, to everywhere but the bridge, like Emmett said. In spite of what her father had always taught her, that there was always a choice, she felt the choice she had wasn't about the life or death of someone else, it was about the life or death of herself. The smugglers would break through the door if she didn't put them into lockdown, they would get in and kill her without hesitating, before the Krixes could be saved.

It wasn't like that was the end of their problems, though. Not at all. Because one of them now had to pilot the ship.

"Are we safe now?" she asked.

"Safe enough. They might find a way to breach or override, but that'd take hours without an AI or a genius," Emmett sighed. He was doing things to the computer.

"What should I do now?" she asked him.

"Go sit in the co-pilot's seat of the console bay down there and see if you can't get a star chart loaded up, a mapping program. Figure a way to enter raw coordinates," he asked her. She stood up slowly, "Careful of your leg, though. We should have more than enough time." He smiled. He didn't seem happy though. Were there now people choking to death in the rest of the ship? Maybe the oxygen depletion would dissuade them from using a blowtorch. Blowtorches needed oxygen to work. But then, breaking through into the bridge to switch ship-wide oxygen functions back on was probably worth the risk. Their only hope was really that they didn't have any way to get to the torches in the first place.

Jenny limped with some difficulty down the small set of silver stairs to get the pilot's bay, sitting in the seat on the right, the co-pilot's, as it was labelled.

"It shouldn't be too hard," Emmett told her, "This ship will be stolen, the systems warped until they go wherever the smugglers tell it. This is a commercial transportation ship, it would be programmed to disallow passage through dangerous sectors, unless overridden by the captain or an external superior. Smugglers _need_ dangerous sectors, though. This thing'll go wherever you tell it."

"Sure, sure…" she sighed, rubbing her head. Her palm shone with sweat. "What're these coordinates?" He gave her a very long string of numbers then, about twenty-seven. Coordinates took three segments, segments broken down into three phrases of three numbers each. It was like longitude and latitude, but space wasn't a two-dimensional map, it was three dimensional. They required length, height _and_ depth to navigate. "Enceladus Seven? That's an Earthling colony, isn't it?"

"The Time Agency is an Earthling organisation," Emmett answered, "It's military. They'll want the ship _and_ the Krixes."

"The Krixes will be dead because I cut off the oxygen," she told him shortly.

"They might not be. What's the ETA on Enceladus Seven?"

"Infinite, because we haven't set off," she answered. The engines rumbled below, but they were not taking off, because Emmett was still fidgeting over there instead of coming and helping her where she was. Because it was awkward sitting, she took her crossbow off and let it sit on the floor, propped up by the edge of the desk.

"I'm gonna have to keep moving back and forth to monitor the engines," Emmett complained, but he finally left that station and came over to sit on her left, hitting switches, "I told you, it's basically autopilot."

"Autopilot isn't going to get us out of the cenote," she said, "Don't suppose you could rig up that vortex manipulator?" Emmett laughed.

"Rig it up? What do you mean?"

"Connect it. Couldn't you use that technology to make a whole ship that could time travel?"

"Yeah, they used to, until they compressed the hardware and stuck it in a wrist strap. What you're talking about is primitive."

"What's wrong with primitive? Primitive is reliable," she answered.

"You're talking about technology thousands of years old," he said.

" _You're_ thousands of years old," she remarked, "You hook that up, we get there within seconds."

"I'm thirty. And it's too big. The circuitry won't work. It's a nice idea. I'd've done that first if it was possible, but it would take hours. We'll just fly. Everybody flies in and out of here, how hard can it be? I mean – well, that sounds like famous last words… listen, slow and steady, alright? That tunnel is huge. The anti-gravity will keep us safe, it's just like navigating an asteroid belt," he said.

"Navigating an asteroid belt isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world, even _I_ know that," Jenny snapped at him, and thought she heard a biting comment about her not even being two years old in retaliation.

Nevertheless, the freighter was lifting, up and up and up towards the roof of the hanger. If they hit any of the icy stalactites with the hull, they would break off and be sent torpedoing down into the people below. It was like an elephant doing ballet, trying to get that thing out of the cenote. It went forwards slowly, carefully, sending down awful heat below. The thrusters she had to keep manually angling, moving them about so they could make the narrow curve they had to so that they could race up like a spearhead towards the bright daylight of Tungtrun and its close-by white star.

Rockets kicked in as soon as they got the upwards angle and it was a straight shot directly out of the atmosphere, and she felt exhilarated, felt like laughing in spite of her perhaps murderous actions cutting off the oxygen. This was the most alive she had felt in her whole life, more or less, ever since she stole that Messaline shuttle, all full of hope. Then they were up into the darkness, the shining tundra of Tungtrun, the icy wastes, speeding away behind them. She could not see the planet, but she was sure it was just a distant blot. Her entire life so far, almost, gone. They were in space. She was in a spaceship, travelling through space, with a suave, gorgeous Time Agent who promised to show her the stars and the universe.

The autopilot kicked in and the freighter swung itself around in space, the sun slid across the front windows and out of their view as they turned to head right out of the system towards Enceladus Seven. The year was 6014, and she was free.

* * *

"What did you mean when you said you messed up on your last assignment?" Jenny asked Emmett. She kept obsessively checking her bandaged leg to make sure there wasn't any leakage. There wasn't, she'd done a relatively good job, and the laser sutured the wound itself, but she still worried. Death was the last thing she wanted.

"Had to apprehend a dangerous rogue of the Agency. Ran off because they 'stole' his memories, or something. I don't know. Stole an old ambulance while there were people in need of it, I stayed behind to help them instead of chasing him. He got away," Emmett answered, "They said I'm too empathetic. Figured if they gave me this job it'd teach me to sometimes do what's hard to make things easier. Switching off the oxygen. Guess it taught you that as well. Sorry. I didn't mean for that. If those two hadn't caught us, we might have had long enough to find out a way to do an emergency lockdown without hurting anyone. As long as criminals don't have those Krixes, more lives have been saved than lost."

"The ends justify the means?"

"You could say that. Still feels pretty awful, though, doesn't it?" he said, sighing. He slouched in his seat, then made a start, "I'd better go and check on the engines again." She stared out of the window at the darkness and the planets and the stars. It was beautiful. There were so many colours in the galaxies around them, galaxies that looked the size of her palm but were impossibly huge.

"What did you mean about the Doctor? That he has the blood of millions on his hands?"

"There was a war," Emmett answered, "I don't know a lot about it. I know he killed his whole species, though. Lots of species. The Doctor has a reputation for causing chaos like that."

"He… what? The… he never told me that it was _him_ , that…" she sighed. Even if the other Time Lords were still alive, would they have ever accepted her? Her, a clone? A clone of a murderer? "That's how people know him?"

"It's how all the people _I've_ met know him. Did he really not tell you anything?"

"No."

"I heard they had strange names, the Time Lords. Another race, I mean, they're bound to, you know?"

"So what?"

"So, 'Jenny' isn't exactly the most _out there_ name in the world. Jenny and no surname. Did your father not have a surname?"

"Not that he told me. He didn't tell me a lot of things. He wasn't… he wasn't the most _immediately accepting_ of fathers. I mean, eventually, he… offered to let me travel. Then I jumped in front of a bullet for him. He left before I woke up, didn't think I'd be able to regenerate because that machine made me."

"Really? He only appreciated you in death? Who shot you?"

"This general."

"Did the Doctor kill him?"

"No."

"Wow. But he named you, though. He must have liked you to name you, and such a sweet name," Emmett told her. She listened to his words and continued to stare out of the window, listening out for any blowtorches or warnings.

"Yeah, he named me _Genetic Anomaly_. That's what he called me. He had this friend, she was called Donna, _she_ liked me, she suggested Jenny. I'd've taken _her_ last name, maybe, only I'm not sure I ever knew what it was. If I did, I don't remember," she sighed, "I have to find him, though. Tell him I'm alive."

"Well, you know, just hang about Earth in the past. I always heard he likes-" Emmett's words were cut off by a gunshot. Not laser, _powder_ , an old-style weapon. She turned in her seat to see that boy, the same boy Emmett had shot in the ankle, standing right there next to Emmett and holding a gun. She didn't know where Emmett had been hit, but the boy shot at her head right afterwards. How the hell did he get in? Was there an entrance they hadn't checked?

Jenny's reflexes were fast, though, faster than that boy realised. She dodged the bullet and heard a crunch, turning her head under the cover of the chair she was in to see the bullet embedded in the glass window. Not that the window would break, that glass could withstand huge amounts of pressure and was probably two feet thick.

All of her thoughts of the rights and wrongs of killing and murder flew out of her head in a frenzy, because wherever Emmett had been shot, it didn't sound good. He was doing nothing to rid them of their assailant, and concern for him went above the issue of sending this boy whimpering into eternal nothingness. He was dead before she knew what she was doing, and she held her crossbow in one hand having just shot a bolt straight through his eye and into his brain.

Jenny stood in unmoving shock for a long few seconds, in a trance. A boy was dead, a person was dead, dead because of _her_. She was a murderer. What would her father have done? He had not killed Cobb for her. She had killed this boy for Emmett, and Emmett might be okay yet – what did that make her? Cold-blooded? A monster? Would the blood of millions collect on her hands like the Doctor's? She had refrained from killing anybody on Messaline, in the middle of a war. This was no war. She could have knocked him out, could have found something to throw, snuck around. But maybe that was unrealistic, with her injured leg. If she had shot him earlier, when he was right there in front of her like a crying child, then Emmett would not have been wounded. If they had been okay, though, she would have regretted it forever, not knowing what she could have prevented.

Emmett choked her name and she dropped the crossbow. It crashed to the floor and the spell of murder over her was broken. She ignored the smarting pain in her leg and ran over to him immediately and found he had been shot right in the gut at close-range, point blank. Why not the head? The boy had been aiming for a painful death. His sadism made her feel a little better about killing him, stopped her from thinking about the fact she had just stepped right over his freshly killed corpse with the crossbow bolt sticking out of the eye socket. She pressed her hands hard to the bullet wound to try and stop the bleeding.

"What do I do, what do I do?" she begged Emmet, crouching in front of him because the wound was low. This injury warranted emergency hospitalisation. Sewing him up with the stuff in the first aid kit wold just lead to him dying a little slower from massive internal bleeding, and he was bleeding from both sides, she could see blood on the chair behind him and pouring through her fingertips. "I have to save you, you promised to help me, you can't die, you can't leave me now."

"I'm sorry…" he coughed, and she saw blood on his teeth.

"Don't close your eyes, Emmett, don't close your eyes," she pleaded, "How did he get in?"

"A maintenance duct," Emmett said. She spotted it behind him, an open ventilation panel. The boy was small enough to sneak in. Sneak back in, kill the pair of them, switch the oxygen back on. If he'd succeeded, it would be as though they had never been there at all. Apart from the bodies.

"I should've shot him earlier – why didn't I shoot him?" she asked, like Emmett had the answer.

"It's not your fault, Jenny Nobody."

"It is my fault. If I had shot him, like you shot that other one – and, and now he's dead anyway, what difference does it make? If I'd shot him, you'd be okay," she said with tears in her eyes, "We always have a choice – my father, he – and now – I didn't even think, I just shot him, I barely even knew…"

"Live your own life, Jenny, without him."

"With you."

"No," he smiled slightly, "Not with me."

"Yes, you're not dying. You can't die, not here," she hissed at him angrily, but her hands were soaked with his blood, "You're my way into a better life."

"Here, here," he tried to sit up but couldn't because she was holding him down. She knew it was no use, she knew he was dying, that he had minutes left, but she didn't move her hands.

There was a banging sound at the door into the bridge and she heard voices from the other side, cruel voices, shouting something at the boy about how if he didn't get the door open in the next minute they were just going to melt it. Blowtorches, of course. They'd managed to find them. And now she was stuck, what was she going to do? Emmett was going to die and she would be at the mercy of a bunch of smugglers. She couldn't kill all of them – could she? Emmett was still trying to move though.

"Just stay still, you'll be fine," she lied. He knew she was lying, but it seemed like he appreciated her dishonesty.

"I'm giving you this," he said, fumbling with his arm.

" _What_? Your vortex manipulator? I can't take that," she said.

"You have to get away from here," he told her, "They'll kill you. They'll keep killing you until you can't-" he gasped in pain and she pressed down on his abdomen harder, "…can't come back anymore." He pushed it into her hands.

"I don't know how to use this!" she exclaimed.

"It's all set, just push this one…" he touched a button on it with a bloody finger and stained it, "You have to go before they come in."

"I'm not leaving you," she said firmly.

"You have to."

She heard a hissing sound and glanced at the door on the left again, and saw the bright orange sparks from the blowtorch they were using to cut through.

"You only have a minute – they'll _kill_ you, you have to leave-"

"Well, where? Where will it take me?" she asked, and he didn't say anything, "Emmett? Emmett, no, you can't – you have to stay – you can't die!" He made a noise that sounded like a half-formed goodbye. "No, no. No no _no no no_!" She moved one of her hands and lifted up his eyelid, covering his face with his own blood as she did, and got no response. Then she took his pulse, and found nothing, "If you can hear me – still – I'll – I'll… I'll let the Time Agency know what happened. Your family, if they… if you have any…" She knew he couldn't hear her anymore, but she still spoke to him.

The door was halfway towards being open, but what could she do now? Leave, obviously. But what about Emmett? What would they do to his body? The Doctor had left her behind. If he had just taken her body, taken it to bury her somewhere, they could be together. She couldn't leave Emmett in this hell. So she grabbed hold of his arm and hoped that vortex manipulators took dead bodies and pushed the button with the blood on it and felt yet again like she had been sucked out of reality and all of her blood vessels were going to explode.

Until she fell out of the sky from a small yet surprising height and splashed down into heavy water and was instantly submerged, still feeling Emmett's arm under her fingers. For a second she worried that she was drowning, but she hit the ground. The ground was unstable though and she flailed around until she found herself breathing proper air and clutching the hand of a dead man, sopping wet.

On her feet, wobbling, she coughed, still covered in blood and stood in knee-deep brown water. It was warm and humid, she immediately noted. And there was fauna everywhere. Trees and plants and greenery – she had never seen so much green before, just like when she was on Tungtrun she had never seen so much white. Wherever she was, it was not Tungtrun, it was somewhere else entirely. And it was a swamp, that much was clear. She'd never been to a swamp, or really seen one, but she knew what one was. Blood stained the water, and she reached down to haul Emmett up and out of it. How would he want to be buried? She hadn't a clue. _Would_ he want to be buried? Or cremated? Or… stuffed? Taxidermy? She didn't know human customs, didn't know if they might all _want_ to be made into taxidermy horrors.

She held his body up as best she could, but didn't know where to take it. How did she know this wasn't just a completely uninhabited swamp planet? No people at all? Would she have to find a way to build an axe, chop down trees, make shelter? It couldn't be, she realised. There must be people. Wherever she was, Emmett had put the coordinates in. Why would he want her to go to empty wetlands?

Jenny resolved that her best bet would be trying to find some kind of solid ground, not submerged in muddy water. So she dragged Emmett in a random direction, hoping for the best. And that was when she heard an angry hissing noise. She turned her head to see behind her and saw a creature, a dark green reptilian beast over ten feet long with its head and spines down its back and its tail sticking out of the water. It lifted its long head and opened its mouth slightly to hiss at her, showing crooked rows of deathly sharp fangs and tiny, evil eyes. As far as natives of the unknown planet went, this one was _not_ friendly. It was going to kill her.


	2. DeLacey

**DeLacey**

The monster had tiny little eyes and it leered at her from among the reeds in the muddy water of the hot swamp. There were bubbles rising and bursting around her and the sound of insects. Large, foreign bugs buzzed around her head and Emmett's body, coming to make a festering mess of his remains when they smelt the blood. No doubt that was what lured the great green beast over as well, thinking Emmett was an easy meal.

"Nice terrifying monster," Jenny said softly to it, "Please don't hurt me." It hissed and snapped its foot-long jaws at her and made to come forwards after she and Emmett. Having never seen a creature like this on Tungtrun, something massive and scaled living in water and hissing, she didn't know what to do. She yelped and tried to turn, still lugging Emmett with her. How fast was it? Could she outrun it? Would it tire easily? But where was she to go? What if there were dozens of these creatures everywhere? What if they were the planet's apex predators? Jenny dragged Emmett's body through the silt and saw a rust-coloured cloud of blood in the murky water leading the beast after them.

She felt like she was left with no option, she was going to have to kill it. She was tired, and she needed to figure out where she was and if there was anywhere inhabited nearby, so the thing would have to die for her safety. And for food, because looking at its thick tail she was sure she could scrape an awful lot of meat off it. Though, thinking back, she was sure she kept her hunting knife strapped onto the end of her crossbow so that she could stab with it, and that crossbow had been left on Tungtrun. Who knew how far away it was now? Jenny needed a weapon. Her crossbow gone, her gun Emmett had given to her lost – but wait, she thought, hadn't he taken it back off her? When she proved herself to be just about useless with it when she'd been shot?

Jenny lifted the corpse as far out of the water as she could as the monster snapped at her again, hissing threateningly and leering, so that she could reach inside of his jacket to fumble with his pockets. Finally she found the gun again, a blaster, and pointed it straight at the lizard. But nothing happened, it just sparked – waterlogged. _Dammit_ , she thought. In an error of judgement she looked behind her to see if anything was creeping up on her. It wasn't, but being as her feet were submerged beneath over a foot of a mud, she didn't realise she was about to trip over a tangled tree root.

This she did, screaming a little as she fell straight backwards into the water again. Guiltily she pushed Emmett's body off her so he ended up under the water again and tried desperately to keep the gun above the surface in the desperate hope it might dry off enough to shoot, really wishing she had brought her longbow with her from home after all. Would she ever see that longbow again? Who knew, but the thing advanced, it came right after her. She kicked it in the chest and it lunged with its jaws for her left foot, but with her right leg she kicked it around the side of the face, rolled over onto her front and managed for the second time to drag herself to her feet. But again, the gun didn't fire, and the beast advanced. She kept pulling the trigger, hoping that after the charges died there would still be enough left to kill it and save her life, otherwise her only option was to beat it to death with her bare hands or run off to find a very large rock. Those savage teeth would make splinters out of even a tree trunk though, she thought.

She shot and shot and then kicked it in the nose faster than it could react, and finally the gun went off with a large, red flash. She got it right in the head, burning a hole through its skull and its scales, and it died right away.

She reached down into the water and felt around for Emmett's body again, thinking that if the whole planet was as muddy as this, cremation was her best bet. There was plenty of wood, after all, she could probably construct some kind of pyre. Then at least she could keep his remains until she figured a way to get them to his family. She hauled him up and didn't look around at all until she had found a tree to prop him up against. Only then did she try to take in her surroundings, and saw greenery and mud and water, and _then_ she spotted a man. Just standing there, staring at her. A human.

"Well I'll be," he said to her, when she finally noticed his presence, "Never seen anybody take on a gator like that in all my years, and certainly not with whatever fancy hand cannon ya just used." Gator? Hand cannon? She didn't even know what language he was speaking, only that she understood him. Which was a feat when she thought about what a weird accent he had, one which she'd never heard before.

"A what?"

"A gator." She looked at him blankly. "An _alli_ gator. Ye've never heard've alligators?" He was dressed and not so dirty, so she assumed there was civilisation nearby, on whatever weird planet this was. At least she knew the name of what she had just killed, an alligator. "What kinda gun's that?" he nodded at the gun in her hand. He looked middle aged and he was quite stocky with a few notable grey hairs creeping into a receding hairline.

"Ah, uh… a shooty one. Goes bang."

"Ye've got that British sense of humour."

"I've got that what? What's a 'british'?"

"You are. Aren't ya? Ya sound it."

"Uh…"

"Are you lost, miss?" he asked her, "How'd you get out here in the sticks with a dead body?" Jenny didn't see any sticks – did he mean the trees? "I'd say these swamps ain't the sort of place for a girl like you, but-"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever – this might be a really weird question, but could you tell me what planet I'm on? What star system I'm in?"

" _Star system_?"

"Just… the planet. What planet is this. Please. I'm… very lost, really." He looked at her suspiciously. She lifted her gun to him, with no intention to shoot. She didn't cock it or put her hand on the trigger, but she still pointed it right on his head, "Seriously, I've had a shockingly bad day. Where the hell am I?"

"Earth!" he shouted, getting scared when she pointed her gun at him. Were people on this planet not used to having guns on them? She'd had plenty of guns on her, trying to get good deals in Arooh's black market. She'd been genetically conditioned to keep a cool head, even when someone _did_ point a lethal weapon at her brain.

"Earth? This is _Earth_? A swamp planet?" she asked, staring around. To herself, she mused, _why does my father like a swamp planet so much_? But then she remembered what Emmett had said, about the Doctor hanging around Earth. So he really _had_ sent her somewhere useful. Maybe she just stayed on Earth for long enough, she would run into him? How big of a planet could it be?

" _Swamp planet_? This is just Louisiana, darlin' – could you stop pointing that gun at me? I'm just tryin'a help."

"No, don't think so. Don't know who you are," she said, "What's Louisiana?"

"A state."

"A state…?"

"One of the United States! Of America! Where the hell are you from? How is it you get in this swamp just a mile's walk outside of New Orleans and you don't even know what country you're in? You don't even know what a gator is?"

"I… have amnesia," she lied, "I mean, probably. I don't remember anything, at all. Except how to shoot this gun. What's the currency around here? How do I get money?"

"Dollars, lady. And you get a job, like everybody else."

"Dollars? And how many of those is it to one credit?"

"The hell is a credit? How hard have you hit your head, ma'am? I know a doctor who'll look at you for free, if you butter his bread a little," the man said wryly.

"If I what? Why can't he butter his own bread? Is there something wrong with his hands?"

"Huh?"

"…Never mind. Where's the nearest space port? I heard there's a galactic market on Sol's moon," she said, and he continued to stare at her.

"Are you from the loony bin?" he asked, and she didn't know what _that_ meant, either, only that it was probably bad, "There ain't nothing on the moon 'cept dust."

"Would you kindly tell me what year it is?" she asked with a smile, trying to look friendly. Admittedly, this was tricky to pull off, since she was still pointing a dangerous, loaded firearm his direction. The dead alligator floated in the water nearby, and she could see some big flies buzzing around Emmett and the blood in the water. She still had a lot of his blood on herself, too.

"It's May 7th, 1925."

" _Nineteen twenty-five_!?" she exclaimed, staring at him and lowering her gun. She didn't know a single thing about the Twentieth Century, didn't know how anything worked at all. Especially not a planet she knew had some kind of structure and hierarchy, like Earth. Tungtrun didn't, Tungtrun was a lawless arctic wasteland where you could do what you wanted, as long as what you wanted wasn't an inconvenience to somebody else. _Earth in the past_ , Emmett had said. And now there she was, Earth, a whole four-thousand years in the past. It being the same day was a minor consolation.

"What year'd you think it was..?"

"Strictly speaking, I had no idea. Besides, I don't think you'd believe me if I told you, you'd probably try to get me locked up somewhere. Which would be really inconvenient, since I have to find my father," she said, "Do you know anywhere I might live?" He stared at her. "I've been living in a cave in the, uh, the arctic, for… most of my life. So anything's better, really."

"Sure, I'll tell ya. If ya lemme have that gator."

" _Have it_? Why? I was going to eat it. It is edible, right? Is it valuable? Can I sell it to someone?"

"I'll buy it for a dollar."

"A dollar? What can I buy with a dollar?"

"Oh, you can buy the whole world with a dollar, darlin'," he told her smoothly. He thought he was more suave than he really was, that he could charm the alligator out of her. She frowned at him, thinking that he might be lying to her about the value of a dollar. Maybe she couldn't buy anything at all. Most likely, though, she could kill another alligator, or something else, "You can make some good leather outta that skin, y'know."

"The skin? You can have the skin, I just want the meat, if you show me somewhere to skin it I'll do it now," she said, and she meant it. Just after she got Emmett's body out of the immediate reach of any predators, "And… And I want an axe. You go buy me an axe from this New Orleans while I skin it and come back, and you can have it for that."

"A whole gator skin for one measly axe?"

"Sure thing."

"Well, you got yourself a deal, lady. There's an old shack about five minutes just that way, sits on a little hill so that it's out of the marshes. Old woman used to live there, they said she was a voodoo-lady, I don't believe none of that mumbo jumbo though," he told her, and she didn't know what 'voodoo' or 'mumbo jumbo' was, "Name's Ned, Ned Wilson. What's yours? You remember it?"

"Jenny," she told him.

"Just 'Jenny'? Nothin' else? At all?"

"Uh…" she faltered, and cast a glance back at Emmett's festering body. They had been talking about her surname right before he got shot – surely he wouldn't mind? "DeLacey," she finally said, "Jenny DeLacey."

* * *

 _Louisiana, USA, Earth, 24_ _th_ _of July, 1930_

" _Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me-e, happy birthday to me_ ," Jenny sang softly to herself in the twilight, completely alone, lifting a hot metal cake tin off of the fire where she had been baking. Well, more sort of roasting it than baking it, but she did this every year and knew that her birthday cakes tasted just fine, even if they were cooked on a grill in their tin over a hot, open fire. Not that she'd ever had much of a proper cake to compare her own improvisational cooking to, but if her food didn't poison her, she generally considered it good enough. Sometimes it was more than good – alligator meatballs, for instance, she was _very_ fond of.

In the swamp, there weren't a lot of ingredients to make a cake from, so she had had to go into New Orleans the day before last to sell two mink pelts and buy herself some oranges. Oranges, Jenny decided, were good. She had an orange cake and orange juice to go with her orange cake and, if she got peckish later, she still had one large orange left. It was a simple life, she figured. She didn't really understand the Earthling tradition of putting candles on cakes, but four years ago had nearly set herself on fire trying to do that, and hadn't since. Instead she just pressed seven markings into the surface of it with one of her fingers, seven marks for seven years she had been alive. Seven years she had been fatherless.

She made do on her own, though. In her shack. She was quite well off, even, what with the economic crisis that had sparked up last year. She didn't fully understand the American economy or what was going on, but that was only from a lack of interest. She could get by well enough without making any money at all – money bought home comforts. Money bought her soap, and she always thought that though she liked to smell nice, she'd be alright with just the rainwater she collected and filtered in a tank behind her shack. Fruit and veg and meat she could pick or grow or hunt. She had an axe and she could chop down trees. There was already a pretty good corn crop out back – the woman who had lived there before had been a fan of it, Jenny supposed. There _was_ a _lot_ , though. Money also bought ammunition and let her keep a hunting rifle she was particularly fond of in good condition. That rifle was her most prized possession, the thing could kill an bobcat with one shot from thirty metres away. Of course, in the wetlands it wasn't exactly easy to get a clean shot for thirty metres because of the dense trees in some parts, but she managed.

As far as Louisiana went, she preferred it to Arooh. Arooh was cold and underground and inhospitable, the swamp was anything but. She'd found out from quite a few frightening experiences that she was actually immune to a large amount of snake venom that would kill a human, or practically any Earth-dwelling creature. A coral snake had once bitten her ankle and while she'd been bedridden for two days, she had recovered easily. She didn't even have a scar. Alligators didn't normally come near her, either, which made hunting them somewhat tricky, and any other common vermin she would just chase away. No, between the wildlife, Jenny was most likely infamous. It was better than Tungtrun, though. She didn't have to worry about freezing to death, and even in the painfully hot and muggy summers she was comforted by fireflies and the stars in the sky. As lonely as she was, she couldn't deny the beauty of the marsh.

Her cake didn't taste any better or worse than usual, and she stayed outside near the fire on that sweltering evening in July and ate on her own, thinking. For the millionth time, she found herself wondering what the strange metal contraption gathering rust behind her shack was. She had no clue, but she used it to store water, so that she always had plenty of it. It was so queer-looking, though, with funnels and pipes and silver-grey steel drums, a mangled old tap on the end. There wasn't anybody she could ask about it, either, which just exacerbated the mystery. Maybe it was for voodoo? As far as she knew, voodoo was some kind of magic, and in her experience, magic didn't exist. And if it did exist, it wasn't quite what people believed it to be, she knew that much from everything with the Source back on Messaline. It was science. Science didn't go for much in Louisiana in the 1920s, though.

For her five years on Earth she felt a hundred times more productive than her near-two years on Tungtrun. On Tungtrun, there was little to learn, little to do other than hunt, and she couldn't spend _all_ her time hunting because of the temperature. There was a tiny window in the afternoon for that, and she spent the rest of her time awake and bored and trying to fix her spaceship. She had no spaceship anymore, though. Her ship was gone, and though she had mourned it a little, she _did_ still have Emmett DeLacey's vortex manipulator, she kept it locked up safe in her shack. But as disagreeable as some humans might consider her lodgings to be, she quite liked her life at present. She thought a lot about travelling, about travelling the whole planet because it wasn't like other planets she'd heard of, wasn't like Tungtrun where it was just ice and snow. There _was_ ice and snow on Earth, but there were swamps and jungles and deserts and mountains and entire oceans to explore, and she had explored none of them. She thought if she could just learn to fly a plane, or sail a ship, she could go _anywhere_ , she would learn so many things.

On her birthdays, she thought of her father, wondered if he would throw her a birthday party if they knew each other still, like humans were accustomed to doing. Would he get her a cake? A nicer one? Presents? Confetti? Invite all of those companions of his? Could she meet them? Had he ever lived in a swamp before? He wore a clean suit and tie and had gadgets and refused to hurt anybody or anything, she was sure that he wouldn't cope well at all to be just dumped in a soggy marsh. But _she_ just got on with it, she just survived. She had been craving a way to escape Tungtrun, and now she had the vortex manipulator she didn't even _want_ to leave, just wanted to live and experience the universe. Who ever said you had to flit about like a hummingbird from planet to planet and star to star and century to century in the blink of an eye to experience things? Her father dropped in somewhere for half a day and then left to drop in somewhere else, was what she had grown to think. If he had stayed on Messaline, as she would most likely have done, if only for a funeral, they would be together. Did she want a life like that, though, now that she was living her own way? She heeded Emmett's words greatly, " _Live your own life, without him_."

That was another thing she had needed money for, an urn for Emmett. She kept his ashes in the same precious, hidden box as his futuristic gun and the vortex manipulator. Not to mention two credit sticks she had had on her. Her other possessions had just been furs, and she had never seen much reason to hide them. Nobody had ever really seen them to question their existence or why they looked so odd, and if they did, she resolved, she would say they came from a nonspecific jungle.

Jenny lounged in a shoddy wooden chair that evening, hearing crickets and insects and frogs all around, the rustle of trees in a gentle breeze, the moonlight making the flora glow emerald and dappling the bogs with wispy silver patterns. It was a gorgeous summer night, a gorgeous birthday, and she had cake. The only thing ruining it was not the fact that she was void of friends and family, because she had never had friends and family to really know or miss. No, the thing that ruined it was the explosive sound of a gunshot not too far away, which ripped, echoless, through the marshes and caused wildlife to scatter.

She stared in the direction of the shot, recognising from the rippling noise it had made that it was some form of shotgun. This was not hunting weather for humans, and she stared around for the source of it. No doubt it wasn't anything aimed at her, she was being entirely innocuous and just sitting by a wood fire eating orange-flavoured birthday cake, so what had they been shooting at? If it had been a revolver, she thought, that would be different. She stood up and took her cake, half of it left, into her shack, thinking that a revolver was something people in New Orleans could be expected to carry anywhere and on any day of the week. But this person had gone a mile out of their way into a secluded bog with a shotgun, which could only mean something was afoot.

Hunting rifle in her hands, she dragged one of her chairs up to the window and sat down to look out, wishing she'd had time to douse her fire before the ruckus started up, because she heard another shot go off just then and the closer, splintering sound of the shells hitting a tree. Then the shriek of a girl, and she loaded her gun in case she might have to shoot something. Maybe it was just a jumped-up child thinking she could sneak out and catch herself some game and she'd lost her nerve and started shooting blindly. Jenny, however, did not think that was the case, because she heard a distinctly male and maniacal laugh a second later, another blast from the gun, and another panicked scream from the girl. Not that she saw anybody yet, but she hung up her curtain out of the way (the window did not have any glass in it and was no more than a hole in the wall with a fancy mosquito net) and crouched down low to observe.

Then she really did see a girl, covered in mud in a torn but definitely expensive dress that hung down to her ankles and was sullied all around the base. Dresses looked pretty, she always thought, but they weren't nearly suitable for her day to day activities. Besides, she had nobody to look nice for, not even herself, because she didn't own a mirror. She'd never quite had a care for appearances in the first place to lose one. Another shotgun blast tore the air apart and the girl ducked and it missed her and hit an innocent frog lingering in a nearby shallow pond. The frog exploded, and Jenny flinched. Then the man came into the scene, who was tall, burly and wearing a flat cap.

"You might've lost the others, but ya ain't losin' me, O'Hara," he said to her in a gruff, stupid voice, raising his gun at her again. The girl tried to take some steps back and tripped on a root Jenny had tripped over a good dozen times herself in the past five years of her squatting in her swampy hovel. That was the point at which Jenny decided to step in. The man was a bad shot, anyway, and her reflexes were so astute it would be the easiest thing in the world just to dodge out of the way of his bullets.

She picked up her rifle and went out of the door, then she shot at the leering man. Or, more correctly, she shot at the ground beneath his feet in warning. He jumped and found her immediately, her staring right down the sights of the rifle at his head.

"Why're you trying to kill that girl?" Jenny asked him.

"What's it to you, ya goddamn swamp-whore?" he questioned her right back, and she raised her eyebrow. She didn't quite gather what was so bad about living in a swamp as opposed to living in the city. She had everything she could ever want in the swamp. Well, apart from a shower, and company, and a greater sense of security than at present. And windows.

"I don't abide by murder on my property," she said.

"Ya own this bog, do ya?"

"You don't seem to be in a position to argue with whether or not I own this bog," she said, then she shot him again, except this time she caught his hat perfectly and blasted it away without hurting a single hair on his balding head. No doubt the sensation of a bullet whizzing overhead and missing by a millimetre was disheartening, though, "Next time, I won't miss. I'll get you right between the eyes." An empty threat, but he didn't know that. For effect, she reloaded her rifle, and then smiled at him.

"Just let me and the lady have our business," he said.

"He's trying to kill me!" the girl protested. Jenny ignored her. _Obviously he's trying to kill you_ , she felt like saying. Why else would he be chasing her through a swamp with a shotgun? An incredibly misguided attempt at flirting?

"I think you should leave," Jenny told him.

"Who the hell're you to tell me what to-" As soon as he had pointed his shotgun at her and made to fire, she shot at him with her rifle, and this time she did not miss. She hit him straight through his right hand, the exit wound in the centre of his palm, and he dropped the gun and yelped. She thought maybe she should have gone for the wrist, but that would have been a tricky shot without her having a good few seconds to line it up. She didn't want to miss and cause any fatal damage.

"Get out of here or I'll kneecap you," she threatened. That was what she had discovered, threatening to maim people was much more effective than threatening to kill them. Firstly because she would never kill them, not after that one mistake she had made in the heat of panic five years ago, and secondly because they never believed she would kill them, either. Maiming, however, allowed her to prove herself as a capable shot, injure them in a significantly more painful way than going for their brain or heart or other fatal organ, and convince them she had a certain level of sadism. In this case, as in every other case where people had come to try and clear her out, it worked. It was practically impossible to catch Jenny off-guard, she only slept once a week and had senses far superior to those of a human.

The man held his shotgun with his feeble left-hand (going by the way he aimed, he was right-handed, hence why that was the hand she had shot) and ran away. For good measure, she shot at his heels and yelled at him to get off her land. Earthlings – at least, Americans – really loved telling people to get off their land, she had discovered. Telling somebody to get off her land and shooting at them was a sure-fire way to fit in in New Orleans.

Once she was sure he was gone, she held the barrel of the rifle and set the butt on the ground by her side, leaning on it a little like a walking stick. The metal was hot, but not so hot, and she wondered if she'd just wasted four of her valuable bullets. Four bullets to scare off a human was potentially four dead minks, and minks brought in a _lot_ of money for their furs. And they didn't taste so bad smoked, in her opinion.

"Mind telling me what that was all about?" Jenny inquired of the girl, who made no efforts to leave, but stood up and tried unsuccessfully to brush some of the vast amount of mud off her ruined dress. She didn't say anything, continued to be distracted by the dress. "Excuse me?"

"This dress damn near cost two-hundred dollars, and that brute thinks he can chase me all the way out here and destroy it?"

" _Two-hundred dollars_? For a _dress_? You could get a year's rent on a decent apartment for two-hundred dollars, what are you doing spending that much on some fancy clothes?" Jenny questioned her, probably rudely. The girl looked at her, looked _down_ at her, which was remarkable given as they were stood quite a way away from one another and she was on a lower level to Jenny in her raised shack.

"Depends on your definition of decent, doesn't it?" she said, clearly trying to make herself presentable. Jenny leant her rifle against the wall and then crossed her arms, "What's an English girl doing living in a swamp in the Deep South?"

"I've never been to England," she told the girl, who stared at her.

"Then what's with the voice?"

"Picked it up from my dad," she answered, "Why was that man trying to kill you?"

"Because my father died last week," she told Jenny in a cool voice, "He's from a protection racket, thinks he has a right to my father's business because my father's been paying him for the last seven years not to destroy it. Now daddy's dead, along with my mother, and they want me to sign the business over to them. Or they want me dead so they can lie and take the shop that way – isn't like anybody'll care."

"Sorry for your loss," Jenny offered her condolences instantly.

"I don't want your pity." There was a pause where Jenny just watched her, confused, and the girl stayed there right where she was, ankle-deep in a marsh. She could get bitten by a snake standing there, and would undoubtedly suffer more than Jenny ever had. Seeing Jenny watching her, she finally said, "They'll kill me if I go back to town."

"What're you going to do, then?" Jenny asked her, and she didn't answer. Eventually Jenny realised that as collected as this girl was trying to be, she was clearly conflicted with no viable option for what to do next. "Do you want some cake? I baked a cake earlier. Or juice?"

"What kind of juice?" she said after a pause. This girl definitely sounded more refined than most of the other people Jenny had spoken to, but she'd only really spoken to the sorts of people who bought animal pelts off of a strange blonde girl who lived in a swamp, and they were not the most classy of citizens. This was no issue, because she was under no illusion that _she_ was of a high standing in society, far from it, it was just something she noticed.

"Orange juice," Jenny said, "And orange cake. And I have a proper orange itself." She offered the lost girl the fruit she had planned to have for breakfast tomorrow morning. The girl paused and stared around, spying the open fire. Jenny waited for an answer, knowing she probably didn't look like the type of person this girl would usually interact with, her being a somewhat dirty and confusing entity.

"D'you have any meat?"

"Sure I have meat, but not a lot. Some rabbits I caught yesterday, I think?" she suggested. Apparently rabbit sounded good to the girl. They tasted good, too, the only downer was there wasn't a lot of meat on them, they weren't valuable, and the furs were tiny. But she'd found them stuck in a bear trap and thought, waste not want not. She didn't like traps, she thought they were unfair. She introduced herself, "I'm Jenny DeLacey." She had been calling herself DeLacey for longer than she hadn't been, and it felt as much her own name as Emmett's.

"Viola," the girl said, "Viola O'Hara."

* * *

Jenny's plates were all wood and she carved them herself. This meant they were funny shapes and full of imperfections, and there were also only two of them. Really, she had failed to see the need for more than just one plate originally, being as there was only one of her, but she had been bored one day and overcome with a desire to whittle something. They were large plates and curved up high on the edges so that they doubled as bowls, and Viola found them quite odd. Viola was also displeased at Jenny's lack of cutlery, but Jenny had never had much use for any cutlery at all except for her hunting knife. Her hunting knife, which she had actually been given by Cardak and Ruax upon her arrival at Arooh seven years ago, she used for everything, and it was washed maybe a dozen times each day. And a spoon, she also had a spoon. But no boring, regular knives and forks. What was the point of a fork, she wondered, when everything could be stabbed just as easily with a knife?

"Who are you?" Viola asked her.

"That's a pretty big question for an icebreaker," Jenny said, chewing a chunk of rabbit she had cooked on the open fire, which was dwindling at the night wore on outside and they sat by it. Viola disliked sitting by the fire because she was nervous about the man coming back, Jenny thought. But if he did, Jenny would hear him coming and would have her rifle in her seasoned hands in no time at all.

Jenny looked at Viola, and wondered if she ought to tell her the truth. The truth didn't count for much in these dark ages, though. In the year 6014, if she told somebody she was a clone from the planet Messaline designed to be a perfect soldier and she travelled through time using a vortex manipulator, they would know what she was talking about, even if they refused to believe what she said. Telling somebody on Earth in 1930 that she was a time-travelling clone from the future looking for her lost alien father, she would most likely have to explain the concepts of time-travel and clones and aliens to them to begin with. She did live alone in swamp, though, so Viola probably already thought she was crazy enough without any extra icing. But, Jenny had helped her, would continue to help her if she needed it, as she would anybody, so Jenny figured that if anything, Viola at least owed her a promise not to try and get her institutionalised in some madhouse. _That_ would not be fun, though she could probably manage to break out easily enough. Maybe then she would go travel the globe properly, to avoid capture by people who thought she was a lunatic.

"You live out here in the sticks," Viola continued when Jenny spent too long thinking rather than talking. She was much too used to just having herself for company that she forgot how attention was supposed to be paid, and how conversations generally worked. If she'd known those things to begin with, maybe she hadn't. "All on your own, and just sell pelts in the city. I know you, everybody knows you, the swamp lady."

"I'm famous?" Jenny asked, intrigued and smiling a little.

"I thought you'd be older. A hag, maybe."

"Maybe I'm a young hag. Wait, 'hag' – is that bad?" she frowned. Viola simply told her yes, it _was_ bad, and she sat in silent shock for a few seconds with semi-chewed meat on tongue. "I don't know who I am," Jenny finally said. The old lie, amnesia. Ned Wilson had been told she had amnesia, Viola O'Hara would also be told she had amnesia. While she didn't like lying one bit, even she knew that truth telling in this situation would get them nowhere. It would, inevitably, end with her pleading with Viola not to run to the authorities and turn her in for being a loon. Humanity was simply not ready for the type of knowledge she could bestow, and she wasn't going to mess with the delicate balance of the universe. Well, not until she knew what she was going. That was why she didn't go out and get some fancy-schmancy job someplace, and she stayed in her shack.

"How do you mean?"

"Amnesia. It was like I… woke up in the swamp one day, and I don't know anything that happened before it. All I know is my name's Jenny and July 24th is my birthday. That was a little over five years ago," she said. Once, the majority of her life had been spent hunting wildlife in the desolate ices of Tungtrun. Now, the majority of her life had been spent hunting wildlife in the humid swamps of Earth.

"It's your birthday?"

"Yeah," Jenny said brightly. Viola seemed to be a very suspicious person. It was that or Jenny was weird. She couldn't be weird, though, could she?

"How old are you?"

"Dunno," she lied. _Seven_ , she thought.

"You ended up here, and just… stayed? You never went anywhere else?"

"I've been into town," Jenny defended her poorly-travelled self.

"Don't you have any friends? Any family? If it's your birthday?" Viola was shocked, "Not a party?"

"I baked the orange cake for myself."

"For yourself? And you ate it here? All on your own?"

"Yeah," Jenny beamed, then when she saw the strange look she was getting from Viola her beam disappeared, "Is that bad? What do people usually do for birthdays..?" She knew humans ate cake with candles and sang _Happy Birthday_ , but birthdays, like other Earth traditions, were lost on her. To that very day, she didn't know what 'krissmass' was.

"On _my_ birthday half the town comes to the mansion, and daddy used to have a jazz band in every room and dancing and smoking on every floor. It was like we were living in a darned speakeasy. My twenty-first was like 1927 was getting a second Mardi Gras," Viola told her happily. Jenny didn't quite understand a lot of what Viola had just said, but she nodded a long and smiled because, whatever those things were, they were putting Viola in a good mood. And what could be wrong with someone being in a good mood? It dissipated very quickly though, and was replaced by a look of stern contemplation. "I don't know how you live like this, in a swamp."

"It's not so bad," Jenny said.

"Only because you don't know any different. Do you even know the meaning of 'high society'?"

"What's that, like, a town on a mountain?" Jenny asked completely seriously, and Viola stared at her. She tried again, "A town in the clouds?" She had heard about towns in clouds, but she didn't think Earth was yet advanced enough for those. She was sure she heard talk of cloud colonies on Venus. She would quite like to see some of the great Venusian air colonies, in fact. She'd always planned to.

"The better people, I mean, with money," Viola said.

"Why are people with money better?"

"If poor people were better, they'd have the money. That's how society works," Viola explained.

" _I_ don't have any money."

"Then I suppose I'm better than you," Viola said. Jenny wasn't entirely sure that logic made sense, but she thought she had best reserve her judgements until she witnessed this 'high society' for herself. She wasn't very well going to argue something she had no clue about. She had never had any desire to amass more money than the meagre amount she absolutely needed, for ammunition (or oranges.) "I couldn't live in a swamp."

"Good thing you live in a house, then," Jenny smiled. Viola was studying her. Then Viola turned her attention to Jenny's shack again.

"Is that corn?" Viola asked.

"Yeah."

"What do you do with it?"

"Do with it? Sometimes eat it. It goes for a good price, though, when it's harvest," Jenny explained. She'd never been able to solve the mystery of why the shack's previous occupant had grown so much corn, _or_ why they had such a curious selection of interconnected metal tankards. Jenny thought of the thing as Earth's most complex water bottle.

"Do you know why it goes for a good price?" Viola inquired. Jenny paused and thought.

"Not really – it's quite bland. I can't figure out a nice way to cook it. Sometimes I feed it to the alligators, they'll it anything if you cover it in animal fat," Jenny said. She liked to feed the alligators, because then they didn't come after her, and they were usually quite healthy whenever she ventured to slaughter and skin one for leather. That struck her as double standards, but she happened to think alligator meat was _divine_ , so morals went out of the window when one of them wandered idly range of her rifle.

"Do you know what _that_ is?" Viola nodded at the metal thing.

"Nope. I keep my filtered water in it," Jenny answered, "It used to have a funny taste, though, any water I got out of there. But I've cleaned it a lot since then." She got the distinct sense that every single question Viola was asking her was carefully chosen, than she knew the answers to most of them herself. It was as though she were being tested, but tested for what? Her knowledge of corn crops? Or water purification?

"How much do you really _like_ living in this swamp?"

"It's okay. It's, um… I mean, I don't really remember," she almost forgot she was lying about amnesia, "I've always gotten the feeling I used to live somewhere… cold. Very cold. Before I came to Louisiana. It's always seemed better than there."

"What if a better offer came along?" Viola asked.

"Better offer like what? An offer to live somewhere other than my swamp? I can't do that, what would I eat? I'd have to get a job and _buy_ my food, I prefer to avoid all that fuss. Do you want more juice?"

"Forget about the juice, DeLacey," Viola said, glancing from Jenny to the metal thingy in the garden, an odd look on her face. She didn't seem like a young girl who'd just lost her father and had been chased at gunpoint out of New Orleans into the hospitality of a lonely swamp hag, she was very… calculating. That was definitely the best word, she was thinking. "Don't you care about quality of life?"

"I don't really have anything of higher quality to compare my life to right now. And I'm fond of the swamp, I've been in the swamp for five years," Jenny said.

"But don't you want, say, a bath?"

"A _bath_? There's a bayou ten minutes away."

"You wash in a _bayou_?" Viola stared at her, "What about soap?"

"Soap's just animal fat, I can't see how rubbing animal fat on myself would make me cleaner," Jenny said, "I made it before, but I didn't see much point in it, so I sold it off."

"And your hair is so lank," Viola continued to stare at her. Jenny was considering asking her to cut to the point, but it was like the girl was formulating a plan, "But in the face – you're so pretty." Jenny didn't have a thing to say to that. Absently, mostly to herself, Viola added, "I would be the toast of all the ladies if I civilised you…"

"If you _civilised_ me?"

"Cleaned you up a little. Taught you manners."

"I'm not sure there's much wrong with my manners, thank you very much," Jenny said.

"No, you're right. Just a wash, and a dress… How good of a cook are you? You say you made soap? All on your own, you made soap?" Jenny nodded. "Did you have a recipe?"

"I don't use recipes."

"Not for anything? Not for the juice, or the cake?"

"No."

"Jenny DeLacey, you're a real diamond in the rough living out here, you know. In New Orleans, you'd have men falling at your feet."

"Why should I want men to stumble?" she frowned. Viola laughed like she had said something funny.

"That," Viola pointed at the metal thing again, "The woman who used to live her must have been brewing whiskey out of corn. You know what whiskey is? Alcohol? I hear that you ferment corn mash and distil it."

"Okay?" Jenny was at a loss.

"I think we can help each other out. You see, if I go home without any sort of protection, I'll have my throat cut while I sleep by these criminals who wanted money from daddy," Viola explained, "And if what you say about making soap is true, why, you're sure to be a dab hand at making moonshine."

"Alcohol? Why do people want it?"

"It's illegal. Haven't you heard of Prohibition out in your swamp? Haven't you ever had anyone coming after that?" Again, she pointed at the tankards, "That's a moonshine still. Takes no work at all to keep a still going, the hard part is keeping the still safe. You must've scared off dozens of people before."

" _That's_ what they want? The men who come all the time and try to shoot me?" Jenny asked in awe. She'd just thought they didn't really like her for all the game she killed, because she hadn't had a lot of other reasons to go by. Eventually she'd just started thinking Earthlings were very aggressive and she was just the sort of person who inspired people to attempt murder.

"They probably think you're making moonshine in it. They'll be gangsters, you know."

" _Gangsters_?"

"The same sort of gangsters who ran the protection racket on daddy's shop and had him killed. See, I'm not an empty-headed pushover. They all thought I was harmless, but every time they came to collect daddy's money, I listened to what they said. They were always trying to convince daddy to sell them his shop and let them open a speakeasy in the basement," Viola explained.

"A what?"

"A saloon. You know what a saloon is?" That much she _did_ know. "An illegal one. So they can sell alcohol out of it." As much as Jenny did pride herself on her high moral fibre, objectively, she sometimes thought this wasn't true, because of her willingness to go against the law. On Messaline, she had been a deserter from the army. On Tungtrun, well, the whole planet was lawless and she'd done a lot of scavenging for the black market, which had always been Arooh's main industry. When it came to doing something illicit, she actually wasn't all that perturbed.

"You want me to make moonshine for you?" Jenny said.

"I'm going to open that speakeasy now that _I_ can control the business."

"But… if they wanted to kill you before, won't they extra want to kill you now?"

"Certainly. That's why you're going to come and live with me – I do love company, and with mother and father both dead, it will be most empty. I'd hate to be lonely. Surely you do get lonely out here?" Viola said.

" _Live with you?_ I barely know you! You barely know _me_! I'd gladly make you the moonshine, but don't you think I ought to stay and guard the still?" she said.

"Well then you'd be doing something for nothing, and that would make me a dishonourable businesswoman. Why, it would be voluntary servitude. You couldn't even call it a favour, I haven't done a single thing for you. But if you came back to the city with me, you would have everything you could ever want. A clean bath, clean clothes, company, a real livelihood. And you've already scared so many men away from this still, you'd barely have to check on it to make sure it was safe," Viola told her, "I'd pay you five dollars a week. Charge you nothing in rent."

" _What_? All for this moonshine?"

"And for a bodyguard."

"Me? A bodyguard?"

"Oh, doesn't it sound marvellous? I would be safe, and daddy's business would prosper, I would be rich. Richer than anyone," Viola said. Money was clearly her primary motivator, not keeping her father's legacy from falling into the hands of any gangsters. "And you would be clean and sheltered and wouldn't smell half as bad. You wouldn't have to kill for food, you wouldn't be treated like one of those filthy lepers in the city. I could make you into a diamond."

It was a proposition of greed. Viola wanted money, wanted to spite those gangsters by opening an illegal establishment of her own. Unless Jenny turned out to be a psychopath, Viola did not stand to lose a single thing. She would have the pleasure of cleaning Jenny up and making her 'respectable', 'presentable', while Jenny would be stuck skulking around some large mansion. But then, it seemed to Jenny a very easy job to do. A very easy life. A job, a home, perhaps a friend? Other friends? Viola seemed the type to have servants, probably hadn't cooked a meal in her whole life. She would not have to hunt for food, skin animals for money. When she thought about the fact she only slept once a week, she thought it would be incredibly easy to prowl this house at night and thwart any attempts on Viola O'Hara's life. And the parties she had talked about? With people? With music and dancing and talking and singing? She had never had a life like that.

Deep down, Jenny knew that she was not going to stay on Earth forever. Sooner or later, the Doctor was _bound_ to show up, bound to trace her, find her, whisk her away again for adventures. But until then, there wasn't anybody saying she had to stay confined to a lowly swamp, just because it was convenient and where she had crash landed. She settled for the marshes only because she had known nothing better. She'd spent five years on the poorest end of Earth's spectrum, an alien scavenger, why not become a member of this 'high society'? Why not become a businesswoman, even if it _was_ an illegal business?

Would the Doctor approve, she wondered? He most likely wouldn't want her to be poaching for her whole life. There must be more to life than poaching, anyway. Other things she could do. Read books? Play board games? Learn to play an instrument? Compete in shooting tournaments? Well, perhaps the Doctor would not quite approve of that last one, but the other three he definitely would. Her abandoning her hobby of slaughtering relatively innocent, usually harmless animals, wasn't the _worst_ thing she could do. Even if it _was_ in favour of opening an illicit saloon in New Orleans with a girl she hardly knew who just desired riches.

The thing that made her say yes to Viola O'Hara, though, more than anything else, was simply because she had a desire to take in as many different cultures of the universe as possible. Isolating herself in a swamp and getting accused of voodoo every other week wasn't quite taking in a different culture. So, with some sadness at the prospect of leaving behind the only lifestyle she really knew and learning an entirely different way of living, she ultimately accepted this offer of Viola's. She agreed to brew her moonshine, defend her from killers, and live in her house for free as pay. Oh, and those five dollars a week.

* * *

 _New Orleans, USA, Earth, 1_ _st_ _of November, 1932_

It was possibly two o'clock in the morning, hours into November, still the night of Halloween, and it looked like the raucous party was about to die down because one of the fiddle player's bandmates claimed the fiddler was much too drunk to stand. When this announcement was made there was both laughter and booing, a smattering of chuckles before everything got a little quiet. The jazz band Viola had hired had packed up at eleven when the saxophonist and the trombone player got into a spat and it nearly came to blows, so they'd been left parched of music until someone had dug out an odd assortment of instruments from the back room. There were few musicians left, though, to keep the party going.

"Jenny!" Viola called to her, "You ought to play." Jenny took a backseat at these events typically. She watched and stayed sober in case there was a sign of trouble – after all, she was still a bodyguard – she might laugh along with the jokes and cheer with the others when someone fell over or a good song was played, but that was the extent of her involvement. It was a shame, Viola always said, because Jenny was 'really quite talented.' " _I do wish you would let me show you off more_ ," Viola told her often.

To Viola O'Hara, Jenny DeLacey was a real enigma, and the only enigma that she seemed to like. Never had Viola had a problem before she could not solve. She was a callous young woman, threw men away as often as her silk handkerchiefs, and Jenny had decided many months ago that she was a sociopath. If Jenny did not bring a great deal of revenue through her moonshine, and a great deal of protection through her general, physical capabilities, Viola would not care about her one jot. To Viola, Jenny looked like a stray English girl who'd lost all her memories and had been discovered impoverished and dirty in a marsh. On top of those oddities, Jenny herself was not blind to the fact she was pretty. Very pretty, even. Boys and girls alike only had good things to say about her appearance. And _then_ , she was good at _everything_. Hunting and cooking, singing and dancing, _and_ she had very quickly learnt to play the fiddle a damn sight better than any human she'd so far come across.

" _Me_ play?" Jenny, trying to stay on the fringe of the crowd gathered in the O'Hara speakeasy, built underneath a fancy little tailors which had belonged to Viola's late father, exclaimed.

"Yes! Of _course_ you!" Viola continued. Viola, like Jenny, did not drink at these sorts of events. She said that if she were to drink her own supply of hooch, it would be like stealing from herself. Jenny had seen that alcohol could make people become completely different. Could make them happy or angry or sleepy or sad. Usually, it made them vomit. _And it makes_ us _rich_ , Viola would say. Jenny didn't care much for money, though. But it _was_ useful to have.

There were shouts from the drunkards around the room, all exhausted but joyous and desperate for more entertainment, imploring that Jenny bend to Viola's wishes and take up the fiddle now the fiddler was passed out on the bar.

"Oh, _fine_ ," Jenny gave up, because she knew Viola wouldn't drop it. She also knew the drunks in the bar wouldn't drop it, either, and if she riled them up Viola would shout at her. She wasn't scared of Viola, but she'd rather avoid the earache. Viola liked to think she had a greater hold over Jenny than she actually did – really, as soon as a different offer came her way, Jenny would up and leave. With tensions bubbling across the Atlantic, Europe was looking increasingly inviting to the soldier part of her genealogy Along with playing the fiddle, history was another thing she had dedicated some time to learning, mainly because she was searching for any reference of her father. She had yet to find anything substantial in that department, though – knowing what his other regenerations had looked like would be a great help. She could have come across photographs of him a hundred times for all she knew. Did the Doctor know how to play the fiddle, she wondered?

It wasn't a very good fiddle, the one promptly bestowed upon her so that she would keep the Halloween party going, but she didn't think anybody would notice if she was a little out of tune. It was good enough for the present. Now, if she were performing in an orchestra, some esteemed concerto, playing for a thousand well-to-do music critics, it would probably matter. But she was in a unclean illegal saloon built into a cellar, and attitude was the most important thing. If she was loud and looked happy, the chances were everybody else would be happy, too. Humans, so far, were not all that complicated.

When Jenny DeLacey picked up the battered old hunk of wood with its feeble, splitting strings and bent neck, she made it _sing_. In her dexterous hands, the fiddle was given a new lease of life, it produced sounds of the utmost beauty, rhythms of her own fine creation, and she practically saw the music dance as the melodies she was making up on the spot drifted between Viola's patrons like ghosts. If anybody in the room was sober, they may have marvelled at her unprecedented skill with the thing. Viola was the only one who paid much note, and even then she became suddenly distracted by a man who had just fallen into a girl. The girl did not appreciate his falling and threw her drink in his face, which the cluster of people around them (like Jenny) thought was funny. Viola probably thought it was bad for business.

Still, the party picked back up, people started drinking, cheering, slurring compliments to one another. All while dressed as the most curious things – she had _never_ heard of Halloween before last year, and she still did not understand it at all. Why children asked their neighbours for sweets, or why adults and youngsters alike wore both frightful and ridiculous costumes, she did not know. Last year, she had seen a man dressed as what he told her was a goblin when he took off his mask. He had taken off his mask because she had shouted some colourful things at him when she thought he was a certain alien who had once stolen over two-thousand credits from her. Why the alien would be on Earth four-thousand years earlier, she didn't know, but it was a good likeness for plastic and paint.

"Isn't she just a doll?" Jenny heard Viola saying. Viola flaunted her like she was a possession, a dirty old gem she had found buried in the marshes and had polished and recut to perfection. Jenny was Viola's protégé in the 'high society' she was so fond of. Jenny thought that her father might think of these 'high society' folks as snobs. _She_ thought of them as snobs. Viola was an incredible snob, the worst of the lot, probably. If Jenny hadn't grown quite attached to sleeping in actual bed in an actual house (she had had neither on Tungtrun as well as Earth, and certainly not on Messaline), and if she didn't actually quite like making moonshine, she would steal a good sum of money and take herself travelling. But she liked baths. And soap, in spite of her earlier complaints about it being animal fat – really, she smelt quite agreeable those days. Viola tried to set her up with men a lot, too, but she wasn't interested. She wasn't a big fan of rich people in the 1930s, the last thing she wanted was to get _involved_ with one of them.

That late autumn evening, Jenny played three songs. Well, it was more like two and a half songs, and none of them anybody knew, but nobody minded because they were upbeat and somewhat jazzy for a fiddle. In the middle of this third song of hers, her fingers following the sounds from memory to create a tune which didn't stray from its original major key, she was displeased to find her ditty interrupted by a shrill scream of sheer terror.

Indeed, she stopped playing instantly, people stopped dancing, the talking died down, but the screaming continued because a madwoman had just practically thrown herself down the stairs of the O'Hara establishment. She recognised the woman, so she figured it was the booze, but Jenny was sure the girl had left much earlier in the night. From that point on, the party atmosphere was irretrievable. Viola ordered the burly guards she hired to start clearing people out, and Jenny wondered what she should do. She would very much like to help the poor girl, but she didn't know the first thing about medicine or first aid. The only thing she could do was tie a pretty good tourniquet, but the girl was not rapidly losing blood from an important artery, so her skills were useless. She decided to fetch a glass of water, putting the fiddle down next to the groggy fiddler, woken up by all the chaos.

When she returned from the grimy tap in the squalid bathroom with a pint glass half full of water, Viola seemed to be trying to convince her security to turn the girl out onto the streets.

"You can't do that," Jenny argued.

"She's had too much to drink and she just lost us a lot of revenue," Viola countered. Again with the greed.

"I don't think she's drunk," Jenny said.

"She was in here earlier – she's the Crockett girl," Viola said.

"I didn't see her drink," Jenny ignored Viola completely and went to crouch down next to the girl, helping her to lean on the stairs. Softly, she said, "Drink this water." That got the girl to calm down a little. Something had clearly happened to her – why else would she run screaming into the speakeasy? Especially a speakeasy run by someone as cold as Viola. If it were Jenny, she'd try her luck in a whole different illegal booze shop.

"I'm taking the cost of that water from your pay this week," Viola said. The speakeasy was now empty of paying customers to witness the argument between the owner and her ward.

"I don't mind, I like putting my money towards good causes." The one thing Viola really hated – charity.

"Hardly a good cause! Her father is one of the governors!" By this point the girl, quiet, was taking large gulps of the water, and the shifty bartender had slunk over to see what all the fuss was about. The bouncers looked uneasy about Jenny arguing with Viola, because while Viola was paying them, Jenny was far more friendly and personable than she was and considered all three of them friends. After all, on her nights hanging around inside the saloon staying sober and out of the way, she found that the bouncers were good company.

"I didn't sell her one drink," the barkeep backed up Jenny.

"You see? She's sober."

"She can't expect to turn up at a place of business without putting any money towards its running and get handouts, you know," Viola continued coldly, "I never like to see a sober girl in here, they're time wasters. Besides, you don't know that she hasn't just had a drink somewhere else. A man probably ruffled her feathers some and she got herself all worked up – I have it on good authority that she's a tease." Jenny didn't even bother to say anything to that. "She's filthy, too." She _was_ filthy, covered in mud and slime. Jenny narrowed her eyes and asked the Crockett girl where she had been, but she whimpered instead of answering.

"When was the last time it rained?" Jenny asked Viola.

"Last week," one of the bouncers told her. The Crockett girl had not been filthy when Jenny had seen her a few hours ago, but now she was covered in mud up to her waist, her whole front shining and gooey like she had fallen over into some dirty puddle. But she had known when she had asked that it hadn't rained for a week, and even then, it hadn't rained much. It had been dry outdoors for days.

"I saw a creature," the girl spoke finally.

"She's drunk," Viola declared. Jenny shushed her aggressively and went back to talking to the girl, taking the empty glass away from her and sitting it on one of the higher steps behind her head, "It's Halloween, she'll have seen a costume."

"Well it can't hurt to find out, can it?" Jenny said, then she pointed something out which would most certainly convince Viola to hear the girl out, "If she is drunk, where do you think she got the alcohol from? It'd need to be pretty strong to make her act like this, and she's clearly been out in the swamp." Viola then thought the girl had been trying to rob their moonshine still. "Let me speak to her." Jenny had won. Viola shut up.

"It was a monster," the girl told her.

"What did it look like?" Jenny asked. Whether she believed the girl had seen a monster or not, as of yet, she did not know.

"It was blue, and it had four arms, I swear on my mother's life," the girl told her, "We were just going to see if we could get some hooch, see, that's all, miss. But the monster was there!" And then she exploded with hacking coughs for a long twenty seconds, in which Jenny glared at Viola to make sure she didn't say a single damn word about the fact the girl really _had_ gone into the swamp to steal moonshine from their still. Jenny recognised the specific smell of that little patch of swamp she'd inhabited for over five years, and she could smell that muddy stink on the Crockett girl. She cared more about the monster than the moonshine, though.

"You went to find the moonshine still? And you saw a monster?" Jenny asked.

"Yessum, I did. And I haven't had a drop to drink! Then I ran for my life. I don't know what happened to those poor boys I was with, they weren't with me when I got back to town," the Crockett girl explained. So the Crockett girl had most likely figured out the location of the still, and had been trying to impress some boys on Halloween by getting them free liquor. And then they'd run into a blue monster with four arms.

The Crockett girl then shuffled a little, calming down, trying to reposition herself. That was when Jenny glimpsed something notably suspicious and notably unearthly on the heel of the girl's boot. It was a substance of some sort, something viscous and thicker than the mud of the swamp. And it was glowing bright indigo. If she had that little gizmo of her father's – the sonic thingamajig – she would no doubt be able to tell straight away what this stuff was. But she had lived in that region of the swamp for years, explored all of it, and had never come across anything blue and four-armed. Not to mention she'd never seen this vibrant purple stuff once in her short life.

She stayed quiet and eyed the girl for a few seconds longer, deducing that there was nothing much wrong with her than sleep deprivation, exhaustion and fright. She needed to be taken home and to bed, Jenny was sure. But there was a monster on the loose after the whiskey still, and likely two teenage boys lost in the swamp with it. It was very easy to get lost in the Louisiana wetlands if you didn't know your way around.

"One of you better take her home," Jenny advised the bouncers, "Her father owns that god-awful plantation to the west."

"Take her home? She tried to steal from me! Us, I mean," Viola hastened to correct herself.

"Well she didn't get very far. And yes, take her home."

"She's crazy. Someone should tell her father to get her committed, sent to one of those loony-bins, you know. I hear they lock up dangerous folk," Viola said.

"She's as sane as you or I," Jenny argued with her, then she added to the bouncers again, "Seriously, just take her home, she needs a wash. Could one of you lend me a gun, though?" One of them obliged. She already had a gun, but she wanted another. For safety.

"What are you playing at here? She got drunk and lost, wandered back here and made up a story," Viola said. Jenny would be inclined to believe her, were it not for the stuff on the heel of her shoe.

"At any rate, someone has to go make sure the still isn't damaged," Jenny pointed out, "You can take up her robbing your speakeasy another day, I'm sure." As she said this, she absently loaded her revolver. "Is there a lantern in here?"

"You can't be suggesting going out into the swamps at this time of night! On Halloween! There are spirits, you know. It's unholy," Viola said, "There's voodoo."

"There's not."

"But there's a monster?"

"Yeah," Jenny said, smiling, then she lowered her voice, "I think it's wounded." Viola stared at her.

"You're crazy."

"I'm going into the swamp. I'll be fine, you know me," Jenny said, "If I could just find a lantern…" She stepped behind the bar and stooped to look around through the stores of booze to find a lantern. Funny thing, they usually just put the exact same drink in different coloured bottles, slapped on different labels and prices. People weren't too picky with their alcohol, and despite her money, Viola had never done well at breaking into the bootlegging business. A shame, really, because Jenny thought it couldn't be too hard to send a boat out from the docks to Cuba or Mexico and bring back alcohol. Dress it as a fishing boat, or something.

"It's Halloween! It'll be a costume!"

"Best check! Those boys she were with could have found the still, anyway," Jenny said, finally digging a dusty old lantern out. It wasn't hard to find a matchbox to stick in her pocket to light it, either, and it had plenty of oil. "They could drink way too much of it and kill themselves, and then what would we do? Hide the bodies out there?"

"Feed them to the gators," Viola said callously, "An unfortunate accident." It was almost revolting how little she cared. The bouncers were finally clearing out of the room with the Crockett girl, the bartender slipping away as well, which left Viola and Jenny with the responsibility of closing up the dimly-lit speakeasy. This was usually the case, anyway, as Viola didn't like the idea of somebody stealing any of her liquor. Once a week she made Jenny hang around, bored, while she took a detailed inventory of her booze stores.

"I would rather they didn't die at all," Jenny said pointedly.

"You have too much compassion."

" _You_ don't have _any_ ," Jenny argued, taking the lantern and heading swiftly for the door out. Viola trailed after her. "What are you doing? Aren't you staying here?"

"What if an ape should try to kill me?" Viola said. Another reason why Viola was so insistent Jenny stayed close to her, she was _that_ paranoid about her own premature death. Jenny was semi convinced that there wasn't _anybody_ planning Viola's murder. There were no assassins lurking in shadows for Jenny to thwart – though, if she had to, she didn't doubt that she could thwart them exceptionally well. But her mistakes had already been the result of two deaths, she didn't want to abandon Viola's side and have it turn out there _was_ a plot to end her life. Then she would have three ex-living humans on her conscience, and she barely coped as it was. She still thought about Emmett when the nights got quiet, whenever somebody addressed her merely as 'DeLacey.'

"So you're going to come to the swamp? You hate the swamp," Jenny reminded her. About once a week Jenny wandered out into the wetlands to lug back the moonshine and set more corn mash off to ferment, then once more just to check on it. Possibly kill herself something to eat in the middle of the night when she was generally awake – that was something she had noticed, she ate a _lot_ more than everybody else. She was also much warmer, and rested so rarely by comparison. Initially she had thought all the Americans she came across lazy, until she decided it was just a human thing. They slept too much.

"If these boys have stolen from me, _you'll_ let them get away," Viola said. That was true, Jenny would probably give them an odd lecture about why you shouldn't steal from other people during such a time of economic hardship, but ultimately, the moonshine was illegal and not hard to make. She didn't care who drank it, so long as they didn't die. She liked to think she brewed good-quality corn whiskey, though – she had a very unique and detailed recipe she didn't let anybody see, lest Viola decide to kick her out. Usually she just pretended she had a gift for cooking liquor. She had gifts for so many things, Viola believed her. In fact, she probably _did_ have a gift for cooking liquor. She'd never tasted anybody else's, and she was always complimented on it so finely by the regular alkies she saw.

"So you're going to come into the scary swamp in the middle of the night on Halloween, where that girl says she saw a monster? Where I believe she did, indeed, see a monster?" Jenny questioned.

"Why do you believe her?" Viola asked. She didn't say 'no', so Jenny assumed she wasn't going to be able to lose her any time soon. Oh well, she was used to O'Hara's company.

"Did you see her shoe?" Jenny asked, heading up the steps, switching off the dim electric lights in the speakeasy. The bouncers had left them behind, and the shop floor above was shadowy. The fumes of the alcohol and revelry below rose up through the floorboards and gave a stale smell to the store and its wares.

"They were out of season, that's what I saw."

"What? I thought they were perfectly acceptable shoes for autumn," Jenny said.

"Out of fashion."

"Aren't all clothes fashion?" she frowned, "Why do clothes get their own separate seasons?" Viola looked at her like she was an idiot, but she didn't quite understand where she had gone wrong. She didn't get the way people would like a dress one month and then write it off the next, it confused her.

"Why were you looking at her shoes, if not to see if they were out of season?"

That night, the streets of New Orleans were messy. It was dark and cold, but yellow squares of light still punctured the darkness. The moonlight glinted overhead and there were hats and scarves and coats from the hundreds of transient drunks, going from party to party to party, strewn across the roads in among the straw and the tyre marks and the horse dung. If a police officer were to go into any house that evening, they would find booze, booze and more booze, all of it one-hundred percent illegal. From what Jenny had learnt of Prohibition, few people cared about it anymore. She heard there were attempts to repeal it in dozens of states because of the Depression. If that were to happen, she thought she really _would_ go to Europe. She was interested in visiting the country where her blasted accent came from in the first place, maybe then she would be able to tell a convincing lie about a non-existent, English childhood, instead of passing off part of her life as mysterious amnesia. Viola still thought she had amnesia, in fact.

There were drunk people dotted about here and there, partiers or cabbies summoned late, people just out and about. Outside of houses, she saw pumpkins with faces carved in them – another odd tradition she did not understand. Some of the pumpkins still had candles burning within, some of them were dark and had been put out long ago. They walked past a charred one, the fire of which must have gotten out of control.

Viola followed Jenny like she didn't know the way to the swamp herself, Jenny prowling through the night with her unlit lantern towards the outskirts of the city. When Jenny stayed silent, Viola repeated her question about the Crockett girl's shoes.

"I wasn't _looking_ at them, something just caught my eye," Jenny said, being purposely vague. She would prefer if Viola left, she could see what all the fuss in the swamp was about without having to go through painstaking explanations of extra-terrestrial life to an old-fashioned Southern belle who still thought slavery should be enforced. "Are you sure you don't want to just go back to the house?"

"Not if somebody's trying to steal from me."

"I'll just make some more moonshine next month, to make up for the loss. If there _is_ a loss. Really, you don't have to tag along," Jenny assured her, smiling. Viola didn't care. She was too worried about her money and her earnings. She was rich as could be, why was she so bothered about losing maybe a dollar or two only? To the impoverished, destitute residents of New Orleans, a dollar was a lot. Not to Viola. Jenny frequently gave money to charity. She even volunteered in soup kitchens late at night, because she made the best soup in the whole city. When would this global depression be over, she wondered? Her father would know. But her father was not there. Her reunion with the Doctor felt more and more like an intangible pipe dream every day she spent brooding over his absence – she thought she might drive herself insane.

"I'm tagged along already."

"Great," Jenny muttered.

"You'll take any opportunity to go crawling back into this swamp, won't you?"

"It's a simpler way of life," Jenny defended herself.

"A dirtier way of life."

"Dirt _is_ simple."

"You must have grown up in a cave, and you subconsciously remember it."

"I thought you weren't a fan of Freud?" Jenny remarked.

"Oh, I'm not, but if that old Austrian goes some to explaining your queer behaviour, I'm much obliged to his drivel," Viola said. The funny thing was, Jenny _had_ grown up in a cave. Sort of. By human standards of ageing, she was _still_ growing up.

For the next twenty minutes of them walking out of New Orleans, it seemed Viola utterly forgot about the mystery surrounding the shoe, and started relating to Jenny a list of every single thing, good and bad, she had ever heard about the Crocketts and their daughter. While she spoke, they drifted north, away from the houses and into the sticks, and Jenny lit the lantern with the matches she'd swiped from the saloon.

There was a chill in the air, and as the swamp grew around them out of the bleak night Jenny had a brief moment of second-guessing herself, where she wondered if perhaps Viola was right about it being 'unholy' in the swamp that evening. Ridiculous, she knew, because she had spent five Halloweens in the swamp and had felt no ill-effects. The creepiness crawling over her skin and making goosebumps ripple up was all a chilling placebo. Trick of the mind. It was still a decent trek to get to the still and her old shack, though.

So many times had she walked this same path, she could see the marks in the reeds from her very own footprints, where she had trampled the foliage for seven years. It was always surreal, but more surreal at night. She never came at night, at night she was 'busy' guarding Viola. Generally, though, that meant a lot of sitting around and making up complicated card games one could play with oneself. That, or reading an encyclopaedia. On occasion she taught herself to dance.

"I still don't know how you could ever stand to live here," Viola said with disdain at her surroundings.

"You could have gone home if you didn't want to be here." Jenny had heard her comments a thousand times before, and had grown tired of them months ago.

Viola ignored her and resumed, "You're so well-spoken, as well, you could only be from a good family. You must have excellent breeding in your blood."

" _Excellent breeding_? I'm not a show-pony."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of. I wish you knew more about your parentage, I'm sure you have wealthy family missing you somewhere," Viola theorised. Jenny was too polite just to tell her to shut up. "You never explained about the shoe."

"It had stuff on it," Jenny replied.

"What kind of stuff? Mud?"

"Well, _yes_ , but there was also this sort of… slime. It was glowing, bright purple."

"It was _what_?"

" _Glowing_."

"You're sure?"

"Completely."

"You're crazy!" Viola exclaimed, stopping dead in her tracks for dramatic effect. She wasn't as shocked as she was trying to sound. Jenny continued to walk, and Viola was forced to continue after her, muttering about getting her dress dirty. "But – but what do you think it is? What could it be?"

"I don't know," she lied. She had a few ideas, but not any she was willing to share with O'Hara.

Then her shack crept into the flickering lamplight. She missed the peace and quiet of the shack and the swamp sometimes. She liked living on her own terms, rather than on Viola's terms, even if she did like all the recreational hobbies she hadn't had the time or the means to enjoy before. After all, she had lived within the tiny four walls of that shack longer than she had lived anywhere else. She still kept her most precious valuables hidden safely under the floorboards – her vortex manipulator, laser gun, Emmett DeLacey's ashes. Ready for whenever she decided to leave the Twentieth Century.

The _other_ thing that crept into the flickering lamplight, however, were some impossibly bright purple pools of substance milling about in the dirty swamp water. It was like when oil on a roadside made a rainbow, and the purple stuck to the grass and floated in the puddles next to Jenny's shack.

"My lord…" Viola stared. Jenny didn't look quite so crazy anymore, it seemed. When she went to investigate what she found herself calling the 'scene of the crime' (what crime, she did not know), she discovered great deals more of the indigo goop sliding down one of the shack's wooden walls, _and_ down the tubing of the moonshine still. It didn't look like it had been violated in any way, though. But the tap on the side was leaking steadily.

The 160-proof whiskey dripping down into the purple stuff produced a very odd effect, however. Where the alcohol dripped down onto it, it hissed and steamed and fizzed, reacted terribly, as though it was burning. She had been crouched to examine this, and straightened up, holding the lantern high aloft to see around. Luckily, it was very easy to spy the trail of glowing purple she had to follow. It moved in large splotches, one big violet mess every few feet.

"Is there any liquor missing?" Viola asked her urgently.

"Probably," Jenny said absently, heading down into the deepening marshes to follow the puddles that floated along the murky surface.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm following this trail," Jenny said.

"But you don't even know what that stuff is!" Viola protested.

"It's blood," she replied, "The trail is footprints, it has an injured foot. I think those kids who were here must have been messing with the still, but this thing doesn't get along well with hooch. Biologically."

" _What_?"

"Not that humans get along well with it biologically, either. Why would you drink something that made you vomit and fall over? To feel happier? Exercise has always made _me_ happier," Jenny said. She expected Viola to follow her, but Viola did not move, remained rigid and standing right outside of the shack. Jenny frowned at her. "What?"

"What in god's name do you mean, 'humans'?" Viola questioned.

"I, uh… ah… what?" Jenny faltered, "I mean in general. Why?"

"Why not say 'people'?"

"Alright, not that _people_ get along well with it biologically. Listen, this creature could be hurt."

" _Creature_?"

"Stay in the shack if you want!" Jenny nearly shouted, "Don't come with me, nobody says you have to." Viola pursed her lips, tried to fix her dress a little, narrowed her eyes at Jenny. Viola might be a terrible person, but she was a _clever_ terrible person. Which was not a good mix. When Jenny left, Viola followed. Viola complained, but she followed, in silence. She was thinking, and Jenny was tracking and listening.

And in the end, her listening paid off. There were a few sounds that were universal to all the species of the universe. In any language, a scream was still a scream. And whimpers and whines were still whimpers and whines. Viola didn't pick out the noises of pain like Jenny did, and would perhaps have deduced them incorrectly, but low, guttural moans with a slightly echoing quality reached them and Jenny steered to follow the sounds and the blood splatters.

"What are you going to do to it? Why haven't you taken your gun out?" Viola asked her.

" _Do_ to it?" Jenny frowned.

"It's a monster!"

"You haven't even spoken to it," Jenny said.

" _Spoken_ to it? What makes you think it wants to speak?"

"Well I doubt it wants to do much of anything, it's lost a lot of blood," Jenny told her. In the pale lantern light Viola looked horrified at Jenny and her sympathy.

The creature had lugged itself into a grove, a wooded knoll a little higher than the swamp water, some of the trees curling around and giving the impression of a cave and some shelter. Jenny knew this clearing well, she had often gone there to stargaze. The trees were closely knitted together on the edges, and when she lay on her back on the grass in the summer she could see the leaves and the stars and the fireflies and space all blur together. Maybe the place was a beacon for extra-terrestrials.

Blood stuck to the grass and the dying leaves on the ground, made the darkened crevice in the branches glow purple. The lantern reflected off of the substance and illuminated the creature for what it was. It wasn't a species she recognised, and it stared at her in fear with four shiny, black eyes. It had two mouths, one above the other, and a long face and no nose at all. Its skin was blue and very smooth, kind of matte, and it did have four arms like the Crockett girl had described. Its legs were also very long, it must be at least eight feet tall, and its right foot was bleeding out all over the place, just as she'd suspected. All it wore was a loincloth, but the fabric was thick and shiny and there was a crest on it made of metal. It took that sort of mass-produced design for her to realise that despite its minimal clothing, it wasn't a primitive creature. Besides, there were loads of species who didn't have the same funny ideas about nudity that humanity did, and cared very little about revealing all.

Jenny met its eyes, ignored Viola behind her, and wondered if she could speak its language. She spoke every language she'd come across so far – Viola had marvelled at it when she'd been trying to buy apples one afternoon and had gotten in a loud and incredibly fluent argument with an old French woman. She hadn't known what a 'french' was at that point, but she spoke the language so well people couldn't tell she wasn't a native. A valuable skill she had inherited from the Doctor.

Viola was saying things, though, and the poor creature was unnerved by her fretting. Jenny turned back to her and hissed, "Shut up, would you? He's scared."

" _He_?"

"Well… well I don't know, if he spoke, I would ask him," Jenny said.

"Ask him!? There's not a single chance this beast speaks English." It then seemed to recognise Jenny as something other, something inhuman, and made a heavy moaning noise with varying intonation. And her brain translated these noises as Viola sobbed nearby into words. It merely asked who she was. She stepped closer and crouched down, putting the lantern on the grass next to her. Viola begged her to take out her gun and 'shoot the darned thing.'

"I'm Jenny," she introduced herself simply. Then Viola practically screamed at the fact Jenny had spoken its language. She was much too curious to run away, though. _Good_ , Jenny thought, the last thing she wanted was to have to go chase Viola and knock her out and leave her somewhere until she could convince her the whole thing was a wild dream. Something to do with these Halloween spirits everybody was talking about.

"Are you human?" the creature asked her in a strained voice.

"No," she said.

"What's it saying, what's it saying?" Viola pleaded. Jenny ordered her to be quiet again, and then asked the creature its name.

"Tolerq," he answered.

"How are you doing that? Speaking to it? What's going on?" Viola demanded.

"What are you?" Tolerq asked Jenny. They both paid little note to Viola. Suddenly, her money and society and classes didn't mean an awful lot.

"I'm a Time Lord," she said. Tolerq stared at her in awe, "Do you need help? I can get bandages for your foot? I'm sorry that you had a run-in with that moonshine." She wished she had been able to go to the still that evening, she could have stopped Tolerq from getting injured. She had wanted to, even, because she knew people would get rowdy on Halloween, but Viola claimed she was needed in that speakeasy. A few hours ago, she had thought nothing of it.

"There is no helping me," Tolerq said.

"Don't say that, of course there is," Jenny told him firmly.

"I have lost too much blood, I would need medical assistance."

"I can give you medical assistance," Jenny said. She vividly remembered Emmett bleeding to death from his stomach and her being helpless. Whatever the species, she was suddenly hell-bent that that would not happen again.

"A transfusion," Tolerq explained. _Ah_ , she thought. She could not give him a blood transfusion, there wasn't any other blood to transfuse. "My ship crash landed. Even if it were fixed, it would take hours to get home, even at light speed. I may be dead by then." Viola had stopped her whining and was just watching now. Trying to understand.

"Hours?" Jenny asked, "…What if I had a way to get you home in seconds?"

"Impossible, this planet does not have that sort of technology."

"I'm not going to let you die," she said firmly, "Nobody is ever going to die on my watch again, okay? I'm from the future, 6014, I came here with a vortex manipulator." Tolerq did not know what a vortex manipulator was. That kind of technology, handheld time travel, was so far advanced it was unbelievable. "Teleporting anywhere, anywhen. What planet are you from?"

"Pueg."

"Pueg? Isn't that in Sirius Fontak?" A star system. Tolerq answered in the affirmative. "Do you know coordinates? Specific space coordinates? Twenty-seven digits?" Jenny asked, "Length? Height? Depth?" Tolerq said he could try, and she beamed. "You're not going to die today, I promise. Just stay right here." She got to her feet, picking up the lantern, hoping he was still right about being able to manage a few more hours. The way the blood floated on the water probably made it look like he had lost more than he really had, and besides, with blood so thick, it must take a good while to bleed to death from a partially-disintegrated foot. Tolerq reminded her of when she had crashed on Tungtrun, had been so sure she was going to freeze to death, and had been saved by the charity of Cardak and Ruax. If she could not show the same kindness, what good had saving her been anyway? She wouldn't let anybody else die because of her ineptitude. The same reason she still tolerated Viola O'Hara, whom she now ordered to follow her away from Tolerq. Jenny didn't trust Viola not to try and smother him the moment she was away.

"What were you saying to that beast!?" Viola demanded of her, and Jenny was very glad Tolerq didn't speak English and couldn't hear her, "Where are we going? Why didn't you kill it?"

"He's crashed here, I'm going to help him get home," Jenny answered.

" _Crashed_!? _Home_!? He's an invader!"

"Your ancestors were invaders in America," Jenny snapped, "At least he's going to leave and not butcher any native cultures."

"What do you mean crashed!?"

"Crash landed, in a ship. A spaceship," Jenny said, and Viola gawked at her. So, this was the end of the amnesia ruse, was it? _Excellent_ , she thought dryly, as they headed back to her shack.

"A what!?"

"Like a boat, okay? Or a plane. But it goes to different planets. Like… like Mars, or Venus," Jenny tried to explain in layman's terms, "He's from another planet."

"He's a Martian!?"

"No he's not a Martian, not any more than _I'm_ a Martian. He said he's from Pueg, in Sirius Fontak. That's about eight-thousand lightyears away. You'd have to keep going straight in the direction of Saturn and then right past it to get there."

"You're not talking sense! You ought to be locked up, I should have locked you up as soon as I met you, DeLacey! Who are you!? _What_ are you?" It must be hard, Jenny mused, to have all of this new knowledge flung upon you. Especially when you lived a cushy life in the 1930s. "And don't give me that amnesia shtick."

"Alright, fine, I'm an alien, I'm from four-thousand years in the future, and I travelled back in time to 1925 and landed in the swamp and just stayed there, until you came along and dragged me into the city," Jenny told her, "I don't have amnesia at all, but I'm only nine years old, I was born in 6012. I was grown, in a machine, and I lived on an ice planet in a cave for two years until somebody gave me a time machine."

"An _alien_!? What's that!?"

"An extra-terrestrial. I come from a different planet. I don't age, I don't get sick, I heal too quickly, I only sleep once a week, I'm abnormally good at everything," Jenny said, "I can speak any language straight away. When I die, I come back to life, and I have two hearts." Viola still followed her, even when she discovered that Jenny was barely a girl at all, was just as much a 'monster' as Tolerq was. She was just hoping Viola wouldn't faint on her.

"A different planet? To Earth?"

"Yes, to Earth."

"You know what will happen in the future?"

"Well… no, not really. I didn't have a lot of time to learn about Earth's history, it wasn't a priority, I was living over a hundred-thousand lightyears away in Canis Perilos in a black market."

"Everything you've ever told me has been a lie?"

" _No_ , because I haven't told you anything, have I?" Jenny said, annoyed, "I lied and said I had amnesia."

"Where are we going?"

"To get something from the shack," Jenny replied shortly.

"If you're not a human, then what are you?"

"A Time Lord," she said.

" _Lord_?"

"Lady, whatever, I don't know the semantics," she grumbled, "I was only a year and a half old when I came to Earth, alright? This is the planet I've been on for the longest."

"You come back to life? Don't age? _Two hearts_?"

"Yes," Jenny said firmly. Her shack finally came into view again, and she forced the lantern into Viola's hands and ordered her to hold it. When she entered the place, she didn't even bother with discretion as she kicked one of the floorboards clean in two with the heel of her boot. The wood snapped loudly and she crouched to feel through the dark and find the lockbox with her things from the future in them.

"What is that?" Viola asked.

"Where I keep my time machine," Jenny answered. It felt odd to call something so small a time machine, and she wished she knew what her father's looked like. She wished he would show up already. It was a large box, it had to be because it had Emmett's urn contained within.

"Is that a dead person!?" Viola exclaimed when she saw the urn.

"Friend of mine, from the future."

"Another Time-thing?"

"No, a human," Jenny answered stiffly. She didn't want to talk about Emmett to Viola. Viola's attention was quickly drawn away to the futuristic, silver laser gun in the box with the urn, while Jenny just fidgeted with the vortex manipulator. It still worked, thankfully, but she didn't really know how to use it. She had never tried.

It took her a few quick seconds just to grab the vortex manipulator and head towards the door. And then, for once, Viola did _not_ follow her, which struck her as odd, as unwelcome as Viola's presence was. Jenny turned back.

"Are you coming?"

"No," Viola answered, "I'll stay here. I need to sit down."

"I'll be back in twenty minutes," Jenny said, "Chase those boys away if they come back after the still." She didn't wait for Viola to say goodbye or wave her away, there was an innocent life in danger, how could she? There was no time to dawdle.

* * *

Pueg was not the most scenic of planets, from what little of it she saw. Admittedly, there was something of a thrill about visiting another planet, about travelling. For a short second she thought she could easily drop everything she had back on Earth and just stay there, but what would that accomplish? The year was still 1930, humanity had not colonised, humanity were just a distant concern for more advanced civilisations. If people didn't think she was a human, she had a shoddy alias. They wouldn't trust her, even if she did save Tolerq's life. Even if she did move there out of the blue, she would be back to her impoverished lifestyle, hunting for food, barely scraping by. Perhaps before her employment by Viola had offered her insight into more lavish and dignified ways of living, she would not have hesitated to stay on Pueg. There was no place for her there. There had hardly been a place for her on Tungtrun, and she had not liked that one bit. The city where Tolerq lived was underground and very hot, anyway, and she didn't much fancy it. She got on her way very quickly. Besides, she still had a duty to return Emmett's ashes to the Time Agency, and she could not leave Viola O'Hara with that laser gun.

So, she reappeared in Louisiana, surprised that the vortex manipulator actually took her to the correct place and time (she had a strange idea in her head that the technology would prove highly unreliable, and might dump her in the stone age.) She was, perhaps tomorrow, going to have to clean up Tolerq's blood. She couldn't have any of the usual hunters of lost miscreants happening across it. Maybe she could collect it in a jar and hope it kept its bioluminescent quality, it would make an interesting – if grotesque – bit of decoration.

As she walked, she wondered if she would now have to find another location to hide her possessions. The last thing she wanted was Viola getting her hands on the vortex manipulator. If she figured out how to use it, she would probably go back in time and destroy the planet, if that were even possible. She could even go _forwards_ in time and destroy the planet, probably with much more ease. She wouldn't have a way to follow her to the future, either. Would she maybe have to move? Leave America? She could probably steal enough money to get away, if needs be.

The door to the shack was still ajar when she returned, and she could see the soft glow of the lantern she had left behind through the cracks in the shoddy wooden walls. She hadn't taken the lantern because she didn't need it; it was a nice night out, if cold, and she had better eyesight than humans anyway. Plus, she could just follow the glowing blood trail back to the still. This was all expected. What _wasn't_ expected was the fact that, when she nudged the door open with her foot, she saw Viola standing right against the opposite wall, holding Emmett's old blaster up and pointing it at Jenny.

Jenny froze. "What are you doing?" Viola didn't speak. "You should put that down. It's dangerous." Jenny wondered if Viola had figured out how to shoot it. When she saw a smoky, small hole in one of the walls and smelled burning, she realised she _had_. Which now meant Jenny was in grave danger. Viola was just a few feet away, she wouldn't need to have good aim at all to get Jenny right between the eyes.

"Maybe _you're_ dangerous."

"I'm not," Jenny said quickly, "I'm completely safe."

"You're not even a human!" Viola protested. Well, Jenny thought, if Viola couldn't see people with a different skin colour as worth her time, how was she going to put her prejudices aside to trust an _alien_? Jenny wondered if she could move quickly enough to kick the gun away from Viola, but didn't know if it was worth the risk.

" _You're_ not even a Time Lord, and I trust _you_ ," Jenny said. A lie. She didn't trust Viola that much not to turn on her. She needed to get that gun.

"How many of you are there? Are you invading?"

"No," Jenny said, raising her hands in surrender, "There's only two. Me and my father."

"So you _do_ have a family."

"I only knew him for a day," Jenny answered. She still had the vortex manipulator, could she enter coordinates for the exact same place in a few years' time? _No_ , she thought, she couldn't do that. Couldn't leave Viola with that gun, it could change history if somebody with any engineering smarts got a hold of it.

"Is _he_ invading?"

"No," Jenny said, "He just travels."

"What about your mother? Is she dead?"

"I haven't got a mother. Single-parent cloning, I told you I was from a machine. You know how you get those synthetic fabrics nowadays? Well, I'm… like that," Jenny explained, "It's just my father. Everybody else is dead." She spoke like she actually knew anything of the Time Lords. The real Time Lords would be just like the Doctor had been, they wouldn't see her as one of them.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know, I'm looking for him," Jenny said, "I heard he spends a lot of time on Earth."

"Earth's huge, how would you ever expect to find him living in a swamp?" Viola asked coldly. That was a genuine blow, she might as well have been punched. How _did_ she ever expect to find him living in a swamp? But, what if he stopped by somewhere close and she missed him? "Why would you stay here when you sound like you're from Britain? Why not go there?"

"Maybe I will one day," Jenny said, "Please stop pointing that gun at me."

"What's say I shoot you?"

"I'd rather you didn't…"

"You said you would come back."

"Well, I… I don't know if I would. I was shot before, and I came back then, but it's only happened once. I jumped in front of a bullet meant for my father, but it took me a while to heal. By the time I did, he left. He didn't think I would come back," Jenny said, "It's, um, called 'regeneration.'" She was doing her best to sound like she knew what she was talking about. She had smatterings of surface knowledge, courtesy of Emmett, but that was all.

"If he abandoned you, why are you trying to find him? Does he even care?"

"I…" she paused. _Did_ he care? "I saved your life. I didn't even know you. Why would you kill me?"

"Take me to the future."

"I can't do that," Jenny said, " _I_ haven't even been to the future. I don't know what'll happen. That's the way in needs to be."

"I could make a fortune in shares."

"Investing in the stock market hasn't really gone well in the past…" Jenny reminded her carefully.

"I'll shoot you if you refuse. Then I'll just take that there device and go myself. Maybe I'll go a whole hundred years ahead?" Viola threatened. Jenny would not put it past Viola to shoot her, not if money was involved.

"If you so much as try, you won't even _have_ a future to see," Jenny threatened. She hated threatening people, " _I'm_ the backbone of your business. In the future, you won't have any money. I'll clean out your accounts while you're away, I'll… I'll burn your house, after I come back to life. You'd have _nothing_ there, like me. I had nothing here, that's why I lived in a cave, or a swamp. You don't want to live in a swamp, do you, Viola?"

"I just want a glimpse."

"You're too greedy to be satisfied with a glimpse. What if you got the coordinates wrong? Landed on another planet? Ended up out in deep space, suffocated? It isn't worth risking death and poverty. You'd have to cook for yourself, too, you could starve. You could travel to where there's an outbreak of cholera and get sick. Into the middle of a war zone. Why do you think I stay here and I'm so careful? Give me the gun." Jenny held out a hand to take it from her.

"What if you shoot me?"

"I always have a gun on me, and I've never shot you before," Jenny said. Viola sighed, and relinquished the weapon. Jenny didn't think she had the stomach for killing. Hell, Jenny was _designed_ for killing and _she_ didn't really have the stomach for it.

"I suppose it isn't worth the risk. I don't want to be living like you did before I saved you." Jenny didn't think she was 'saved,' strictly speaking, but she didn't want to argue with a girl who had just tried to kill her. "What's it like to be shot?" For once it was a good thing that Viola's pragmatism had no bounds.

"Painful. It burns, then sort of aches, and then everything stops. It was just dark," Jenny said, "I'd really not like to die again. I don't know if I would be lucky enough to come back the next time."

"You need to tell me everything," Viola said.

"But… but it's complicated. Science, and the future, and-"

"I'm being forgiving here," Viola said. Jenny hadn't done anything wrong to be forgiven for. Honestly, she did _not_ like this woman sometimes, "I'm willing not to turn you out onto the streets-" _Because I bring in money_ , Jenny thought sourly, "-if you're honest with me. I want to know everything, about this father, and these planets, and these space-boats."

"…It's ship. Space _ship_ ," Jenny said, and Viola sat down in one of the two chairs. Jenny sighed. She'd already said so much, she didn't see how the details of distant planets four-thousand years in the future would do a lot of damage. She did need to find a new hiding place for the vortex manipulator, though. She didn't trust Viola at all. "Fine, then. I was born… or, grown… on the planet Messaline. July 24th, 6012," Jenny sat down in the other chair, "I was genetically designed to be a perfect soldier, but my father, the Doctor, _hated_ soldiers and war…" And then she found herself retelling the first twenty-two months of her life to Louisiana's most self-important snob.


	3. Acallaris

**Acallaris**

 _The Novis Carnival Flotilla, Dragontooth Nebula, 19_ _th_ _of February, 52,614_

Silence in the room, she stepped up to the edge of the platform with her arms outstretched on either side, like a child pretending to be a plane. There would be a wait now, as the people below observed. There was no spotlight on her yet, the spotlight was still on the ground. She was merely a shadow in the rafters, and it was practice to wait until people spied her silhouette for themselves until she began. As usual, she counted down the seconds in her head as they went up and up and up, all the way to eighty-five. When she reached eighty-five, she would take her first step forwards onto the highwire, which was as thin as fishing line. Halfway between the wire and the podium behind her, the spotlight would 'find' her, at ninety seconds, and the silver leotard she was wearing would shimmer like moonlight reflected in rippling water. Then the impressive stuff would begin.

She'd been doing this for round about two years now, a little less maybe, and the routine became lazy in her practiced muscles. It was like her whole head, her head which never quietened usually, shut down. There were no thoughts, there was no anything, there was even very little focus. It was like an out-of-body experience, which was ironic because her body was so involved in what she was doing, and she did her handstands and cartwheels and the odd backflip on the tightrope with a bored finesse. That was part of the act, that she feigned a few yawns, made it look like she was losing some of her edge as she took passive note of the applause ringing out thirty feet below when she did something impressive (and _everything_ she was doing was impressive.)

And _then_ , just when she had stunned the crowds walking on her palms (very painful), she slipped. She would _always_ slip. The spotlight followed her in her descent, the thing floating in the air next to her. People screamed in the audience, they _always_ screamed, because nobody had noticed the trapeze hanging down. Not that that was _their_ fault, by that point they always assumed she was exclusively a highwire act, and the trapeze _was_ painted to match the crimson walls of the cavernous hall. So often she would nearly laugh with joy as she fell like this, wished she could feel the thrill a little longer, fall a little further, but the trapeze hung as low as she was allowed to have it. She reached up an arm and caught it by the bar, the spotlight never straying from its mark.

It would fly up one way and she would swing herself on top of it and pull it back the other, momentum carrying her so that she was suspended in a standing position, on one foot, but horizontal, inertia keeping her balanced. Then she let go of the two wires on either side in the split second that the trapeze hovered. It was as though time froze around her, and she stepped gently forwards onto a second trapeze hanging much higher than the first. For a moment, it was like floating, she was suspended with nothing to hold her up. She could potentially drift away into outer space. Then her foot found the cold metal of the second bar and she stepped easily to safety. She stood and bowed on just one leg, the other stretched straight behind her, leant a little too far forwards so it looked as though she might fall again.

Everything was very samey after that. The rest of her performance was very trapeze-oriented and she always found it easier than the falling parts. It had less of a thrill, it nearly bored her. Wasn't quite as impressive. Dare she say easy? Well, she supposed she would. It was easier because she didn't cut the soles of her feet and her palms open like on the damned highwire, but it had to be that thin so that the illusion of it being invisible was created. She kept her feet very flat, too, so it looked like she was walking on a solid surface. By the end she dropped herself onto a third, much lower trapeze, and then did about three somersaults in the air off of that one until she landed neatly on her feet on the ground. Took another bow. As usual, Evanlex slunk out of his hiding place in the shadowy tunnel that went to the wings and backstage. She left the ring to loud applause and the sound of him throwing compliments at her until he introduced the next act, calling her The Astounding Acrocallaris – a pun on the surname she had picked out when she had left the Twentieth Century.

It was Sunday, the last day of the show before the circus left the Dragontooth Nebula. Leaving tomorrow morning, it would be a three-day journey through deep space before they reached the next star cluster. Another day after that before they were docked anywhere inhabitable. It was a relatively short trip, however. Sometimes it was two entire weeks in deep space, and then it could get a little claustrophobic. She welcomed those breaks, though, because they gave a chance for her feet and palms to heal a little and callous somewhat. She wondered, if she left the circus, would the scars on her hands go away?

"I think you've cut your foot again," someone said, making her jump. There were people everywhere backstage. No two people were the same species, and there was not one human. Humans, unsurprisingly, were pretty unextraordinary. Humans were the people who wanted to _see_ the circus, _see_ all the 'weird aliens.' Mainly because they were just not a well-liked species in the intergalactic community. It had taken Jenny a lot of tenacity to convince Evanlex the ringmaster that she was not one of them.

"Oh, god, would you not creep up on me?" Jenny said to Olia, hitting them lightly on the arm. Olia was a native of the planet Axxen. In layman's terms, that meant that Olia was a genderless chameleon, who moved very quietly, and liked to make a habit of scaring Jenny. That was only because she had been so boastful about her superior senses, but she had quickly learned that other aliens – aliens like she was, and she really did love calling herself an alien like that when she had been stuck with humans for so long – were not impressed by her being better than a Homo Sapien. _Everyone_ here was better than a Homo Sapien. She liked that. Olia was the assistant of the magician and went on before Jenny. Outside of the circus ring, the air was cold, and she crossed her arms against the chill. Leotards, she had learned, were not the warmest items of clothing.

"Sorry, I was just watching," Olia apologised sheepishly.

"Why? You've seen it a thousand times before," Jenny said, smiling, walking past Olia. This area, right by the stage, was storage. It was packed with equipment and others waiting to go on, but it was freezing. Jenny had seen it all before, and she cut straight through with Olia following. Neither of them had anywhere to be now, but everyone was tacitly expected to leave the wings after they were done, to go back to their rooms. Bedrooms doubled as dressing rooms, and they were small and there were a lot of them condensed onto the 'living floor,' that being the second floor, in descending order. There was the ring at the top of the ship, that was the ground floor. The floor below had pretty meagre storage space for their food and equipment. Then there was the living floor, and the third floor was maintenance. It was not a very large ship, but she'd never been one for large open spaces.

So, the routine after the evening shows was go get changed, most likely have a wash, and then everyone would gather in the mess hall for supper. For once, Jenny rarely had to cook her own meals. Sometimes she would go help, but they actually had a chef, who was not so good but was dedicated and took on board any culinary suggestions of Jenny's. People liked her at the Novis Carnival, she wasn't a weirdo living in a swamp who was exceptionally good at everything. Wasn't a medical officer who knew more about fixing fighter planes than the engineers working on it. The airmen never liked when she tried to repair their busted engines, they preferred when she tried to repair their busted noses after they got into drunken bar fights with men who hadn't gone to war.

"I know, but…" Olia began, at Jenny's heels. Jenny wondered why Olia was coming with her, when all she was doing was going to shower and then have supper. A _lot_ of supper.

"But what?"

"I don't know, I always worry you might actually fall," Olia said, and Jenny laughed slightly. She wouldn't fall. Though she figured she would come back, she still had a bit of an aversion to dying, and religiously carried out safety checks of the highwire and the trapezes each morning. Twice on show days, three times if they were doing a matinee as well.

The hallways of the circus vessel were cold. They were always cold. The rooms were warm, and so was the common area, but the corridors and the mess hall were freezing. It wasn't too bad for Jenny, she was warm blooded and had a fifty-degree body temperature, but Olia, the cold-blooded lizard, spent most of their time frozen to the bone.

"You _have_ cut your foot," Olia pointed out again. Jenny glanced down and saw single, bloody splotches on the floor. It was her left foot, and she lifted it up to see where it had been cut. Olia watched. "That looks nasty." There was a thin, red gash down the centre of the ball of her foot, but it wasn't really painful, and not much more severe than a papercut. "I told you to ask him if you can wear shoes."

"I _have_ asked him if I can wear shoes, he won't let me," Jenny said, speaking of Evanlex the ringmaster, "It'll be fine, I'll clean it up later tonight." She wasn't sleeping that night, she'd gladly clean up her blood from the scuffed, metal floor. _After_ supper. "No pain, no gain. And it's worth the pain to live here."

"I don't know why you like it here so much, if I had the money to leave, I would," Olia told her, still trailing after Jenny through the halls.

"It's better than Earth, that's why. Anywhere's better than Earth," she said grimly, "I'd best go bandage this up, though. I thought you had to help Jovy pack stuff up, anyway?" Olia paused. Jenny was waiting to go into the stairwell that led to the floor below. Olia seemed keen on following her, and didn't say anything. "What?"

"N-nothing," they said.

"I'll see you at supper," Jenny told her, "He'll get angry at you if you don't help him pack stuff away."

"No, I… I packed up quickly, already, he let me go."

"Why?" she asked. Olia stared at her, with their small yellow eyes. Jenny always thought it was cute how they could point their eyes in opposite directions, she wished _she_ could do that, it would make watching her back a whole lot easier. Not that she really needed to watch her back a lot now, she wasn't working for a criminal empire in Louisiana or New York anymore. People didn't make a habit of trying to kill her.

"It's not important, doesn't matter," Olia finally said, walking backwards, away from Jenny. If they didn't need to help Jovy pack away, where were they going? Olia had a habit of acting strangely, though, so Jenny just allowed them to do whatever they did without question. She'd never met any others from Axxen before, what did _she_ know about them or their culture? Nothing, that's what.

"I'll see you in a bit though, yeah?" Jenny said. Olia gave her a thumbs up, then bumped right into Utal. Utal was enormous and looked like what would be called an ogre in Earthling stories, and Jenny had never heard him speak. He nodded to her whenever he passed, though, which was more respect than most people got from him. His talent was heavy lifting. The strongman, she supposed. Utal grunted at Olia. Jenny was always wondering if Olia had some kind of balance issue, they were _always_ bumping into things when she was around, and their skin seemed to change colour a little uncontrollably. Then again, maybe it was just hard to control natural camouflage? Jenny didn't know, and she was off on her way down the stairs already, semi-limping.

What a different world this was to planet Earth, what an enjoyable two years it had been after she had escaped from that rocky pustule. As she walked, the sole of her foot began to smart a little, and she walked on her heel as the blood dripped onto the floor. Nobody would pay it any notice; it had happened a few times before – Evanlex wasn't the most forgiving of people. She'd spent time with a lot of unforgiving people, though, and he wasn't the worst of them. She dragged herself into her dinky room and dropped onto the small bed in the corner, glancing around at her trinkets.

Jenny didn't have much with her from her old life on Earth. Viola had a lot of her things still, as far as she knew, kept locked up in the loft of her large house in New Orleans. She'd left behind her old hunting rifle in that house, which she still missed sometimes in an odd way, though she didn't have to hunt any food these days. It was tricky to find game when you were stuck in deep space for weeks on end. She didn't think Viola would get rid of her things, anyway. Her fiddle she had made herself one autumn in 1935 because she was bored, old clothes and furs from Tungtrun, those battered credit sticks that had been stuck in the humid swamp for so many years they probably didn't work anymore.

She still thought she was lucky that Viola hadn't tried to get her arrested, or committed, or blackmailed. Alien origins aside, Jenny had always proved trustworthy and valuable to O'Hara. Still, Jenny made good on her promise to herself to get out of there as soon as something better presented itself, though in retrospect she must have a skewed perception of 'better.' When World War Two broke out, and she packed a few bags hurriedly and caught a plane across the Atlantic to Great Britain, just like she said she would if conflict exploded in Europe. Her stint as Viola O'Hara's right hand woman had come to an end early in 1940, when she was only sixteen. Not that she'd fought, no, she'd blagged her way into becoming a nurse, because for some ridiculous reason women weren't allowed to join the army. Then, for six years, the routine had just been her and other women getting passed around various Royal Air Force hospitals. She'd always been better at fixing the planes than the soldiers, though – and she didn't like how they flirted with her _all the time_. That was just the start of her losing faith in humanity.

She'd lost faith in them in a peculiar way. After a while, and despite all their differences, she began to herself as one of them. She had a brief existential crisis which ended in her realising she owed humanity nothing at all, she didn't exist to clean up the messes of mankind. So when she saw the horrors of that war, which came to a climax after those devastating bombs were dropped on Japan just two weeks after her twenty-second birthday, Jenny DeLacey had upped and left the planet and the period and had chosen herself a new name in the distant future, _Jenny Acallaris_.

With her, she had the trusty old vortex manipulator of Emmett's, and she still had the boy's ashes in their urn on a shelf nearby. She hadn't thought about taking them back when she'd used the manipulator to get to the year 52,612, and she wasn't inclined to go whizzing about trying to find the Time Agency. She did feel guilty, though, if he had a family out there missing him, that she'd been keeping his remains from them for the best part of the twenty-four years of her life. Emmett DeLacey's ashes were some sort of staple, and she felt like she owed him something still. Felt like she needed to show him that she wasn't just going after her father, not anymore. Maybe two decades ago, but after seeing the species he adored so much almost destroy itself, she was second-guessing him. Could those companions of his really be so wonderful, if they stood by and let things like this happen?

Perhaps she had it all wrong, though. It would be nice to sit down and talk to him about it, but she had abandoned her attempts at searching for him on Earth. He could well have been involved with the war himself and she just didn't know it, and she didn't know him, so she had acted upon that human cliché and had run away to join the circus. And what a good acrobat she was, too. Anyone would think she had been training to do such feats her whole life, instead of skulking around in icy hovels and brewing moonshine in a humid, stinking marsh. Living with a rich girl like Viola hadn't made her eyes immune to the squalor America had to offer, and she was glad to be rid of it.

Jenny pulled a first aid kit, stolen from 1940s, war-torn Britain, out from under her bed, holding her foot over the floor so it didn't get blood on her sheets. She wouldn't be allowed to wash them for a few days yet, so it was best to keep them as clean as possible. The skin on her foot looked odd from the scars of thin wounds like this one, but she had stopped paying attention to scars a long while ago. Scars gave her age where wrinkles did not. They were proof in her appearance that she had lived, lived beyond the assumptions of the people who met her and saw a harmless, tiny blonde girl. But Jenny had these slits on her feet, some in her palms, she had two pin-prick looking marks on her ankle from where a coral snake had bitten her, she had a funny white circle either side of her right calf from a laser sidearm. That last one was more than twenty years old now.

She didn't dislike them the way humans did, though. While, yes, they were not pleasant to receive, these wounds she bore were proof of experience. They were proof that she was living. In a way, they all meant something to her. That was why she didn't make much of a fuss when it came to requesting to wear shoes of Evanlex. Still, she wrapped a fresh bandage around her foot and then stood up and went about getting changed into clothes warmer, looser, and less bedazzled than a silvery leotard. She was, admittedly, not the biggest fan of circus garb.

She kicked the first aid kit away under her bed again and sat back down on the bed. Supper would not be until after the show, and the show still had a good twenty minutes. Then another twenty minutes or so on top of that until it was polite to go to the mess hall – she had learnt from experience that people didn't like her hanging around there forty minutes before food was going to be served. Besides, it was cold. Her bed was not cold, it was comfortable and didn't come with risk of mites or bedbugs or any other microscopic parasite, not like the beds in Louisiana. Fumigation wasn't exactly commonplace in Viola O'Hara's fancy mansion. For every piece of finery she owned, there must have been at least a hundred unwelcome critters knocking about in the folds and the seams.

Did Jenny have anything to do? Not really, but she enjoyed the quiet. She didn't think she had ever been the type of person to be so easily bored – after all, when she only slept once a week, she had to have a good threshold for boredom. Otherwise she would go insane. But no, she was quite content to contemplate things, to read books about the ancient histories of other planets and cultures. She drew up internal lists of planets she thought she must visit at least once in her life, and from reading books of astrophysics and advanced engineering, spaceships she must fly. In 1944, she had learnt she had quite the knack for flying aircraft. Spacecraft, perhaps not so much, since the first and only spaceship she had flown solo had crashed on Tungtrun after barely a day. Sometimes, though, she felt like her calling might be aviation. Though present she did feel like her calling was acrobatics, and before she thought it might be hunting or brewing hooch in a swamp. Maybe she had a lot of callings? She was a pretty versatile person, and she surprised herself with the things she could do just as much as she surprised others.

She did wish she had brought her fiddle with her to the future, though. It was still in New Orleans, unless Viola had got rid of it. She hoped not, Jenny may want to reclaim that someday, that and her other abandoned possessions.

A tome about interstellar navigation caught her eye from her bedside table, one she was about halfway through reading. Non-fiction appealed to her more than fiction, really, it had a genuine application in the world. She may one day have to know about interstellar navigation; it certainly would have helped her out after she abandoned her kin on Messaline. Besides, she thought it was fascinating, though no-one else was of the same opinion. That volume was what she passed the next forty minutes reading, she read two whole chapters, and the chapters were extraordinarily long and in a language she didn't initially recognise. Though she understood it, it took a while longer for her brain to automatically make sense of the words.

Her imagination conjured a smell of succulent food which drew her away from the book, her subconscious hunger reminding her that dinner was probably about ready, and she really ought to get going. If she was too late, Olia would come looking for her unnecessarily. Jenny always felt bad about making them waste a trip to the bedrooms when they could just as easily be eating, and didn't know why Olia was so bothered about Jenny having food on time. Olia really was one quirky space chameleon.

Jenny trudged through the hallways, which had more people collected in them now than they had done earlier, people all generally heading the same direction as her, to supper. Though the Novis Carnival spent most of its time in the recesses of deep space, it still ran internally on a twenty-four-hour clock, which was nothing if not convenient. Twenty-four hour clocks were more familiar than some other clocks she'd read about, ones on planets far away from suns where there were three short 'routine cycles' pressed into the space of a solid day, with naps that were never quite long enough slicing the time apart in between. She liked the twelve hour shifts of day to night and back again, though there was an unfortunate lack of what she had come to think of as 'day' on the Carnival ship. Everything happened later than it used to, though. It was eleven o'clock in the evening and the whole ensemble were sitting down together for another meal, _that_ wouldn't have happened when she lived with Viola. Viola needed what she called 'beauty sleep.' Jenny didn't understand the concept of 'beauty sleep' particularly, because she herself always looked alright and hardly ever slept, but she supposed it was just another thing Earthlings were probably wrong about. They were wrong about lots of things, like their wars and their politics. She wanted to stay away from wars and politics for the present, lest a bomb get dropped on her.

Supper was slop. It was always slop. It was ladled into a plastic bowl and varied in colour night to night, across a gradient spectrum that went from grey to green to brown and made room for every dull, sickly colour in between. It was damn-good tasting slop, though, and she didn't know why people made such a fuss about food looking nice. If it tasted alright, what was the big deal? Presentation was overrated, as was chewing, going by the amount of gunge she consumed on a daily basis. Saved her jaw some aching, though. As nice as alligator was, it took a lot of grinding on your molars to get through it properly. She could drink this oddly tasty, hot slime with a straw if she wanted, and that actually appealed to her as she took her bowl from the chef with a smile and went to sit down on one of the smallish tables. She imagined that this was what it must be like going to school, from the stories she had heard. Occasionally she felt as though she was missing out by not having experience with that particular

The glamorous show of the circus was replaced by aching bones and tired faces, all eager for their energy to be replenished by slurping up a bowl of goop late at night. She watched Evanlex drift in to pick up his supper and take it elsewhere – he never ate with everybody else. She couldn't blame him if he wanted privacy, though, people never stopped asking him questions about this or that, refurbishments, renovations or suggestions. _She_ didn't know if she had the patience to be in charge of so many people and their welfare, she often thought she was better off on her own without the extended responsibility of taking care of masses of other people.

As promised, Olia soon arrived, their skin a dark, shiny blue. Jenny knew that shiny blue was bad, though – that was Olia's angry colour. Olia hadn't been angry when Jenny had seen her earlier, something must have happened. But she had to wait until Olia had retrieved their supper to ask about it, and ask she most certainly did. She hated to see her friends upset – anybody upset, for that matter.

"What's wrong?" she inquired.

"The humans who live in this cluster. Some of them snuck on, again. Evanlex has Utal trying to scare them right now," Olia explained. Blech, _humans_. Jenny thought. Her least favourite species. The universe's self-proclaimed genocidal 'overlords.' Always looking for something or someone new to claim faux supremacy over. "They asked me, 'what are you supposed to be?' and if I ate live animals. I'm not a snake, you know."

"I do know," Jenny assured her, "Sorry about them."

"Why do you insist on apologising for them?"

"Because they're too ignorant to apologise for themselves, and somebody ought to do it," Jenny answered. Olia watched her with an expression she could not deduce. Truthfully, the shade of blue they presently were was so dark and had such a funny sheen to it in the glaring lights of the mess, it made trying to read faces even harder. And then there was the fact every single intelligent race had a totally new etiquette of body language. Sure, she could _speak_ any language, but this was an entirely different and hard to master skill. "For the record, they're not any better to each other."

"Why do you never talk about your time on Earth?" Olia asked.

"Because every happy memory I have of Earth, or anybody who lived there, is tainted," she explained. And that was all she would explain. She didn't want to give Olia the full details, Olia did not need the full details of the atrocities humanity had carried out against itself. Every inkling of faith she had in that species had been destroyed in the summer of 1945. Every time she thought to herself that she understood why the Doctor spent so much time drifting around the Twentieth Century and beyond, carrying humans to and fro through the universe, had been subverted in her memory. A lapse of judgement. No wonder her father had seemed to against war, seeing the wars of humans, the devastation they caused. She had seen what they had done and had renounced every part of herself in which she saw their influence, then she had runaway as far to the future as she could manage.

"What do you mean?"

"It doesn't matter what I mean, I don't want to talk about it. I don't even like thinking about it." She went back to her slop.

"I… I'm sorry."

"What? No, it's nothing to do with you. Figure I might be curious about _your_ past if _you_ were a time traveller who never talked about themselves," Jenny tried to lift the mood, but she didn't do a very good job of it. She tried not to ask her colleagues invasive personal questions, it just seemed rude. A lot of them were not her close friends, they were just acquaintances. Even her actual friends like Olia, though, she didn't question. She didn't want to be rude. If there was something someone wanted her to know, something that was her business, they would tell her. That was what she relied on.

Besides, as far as sharing personal information went, Jenny had already shared plenty. Her origins and her time on Tungtrun, her real species, real talents, real father, none of this was a secret. Sure, there were still people who thought she was crazy, she couldn't possibly be the Doctor's daughter (the further into the future she found herself, the more infamous her father became to even the most ordinary or secluded of people), but her medical tests didn't lie. She had the x-rays and the scans, two hearts beating away fiercely in her ribcage there for all to see. All to hear, too, if they had a stethoscope.

"What?" Jenny asked, getting drawn out of her thoughts by Olia looking at her. The blue was receding, replaced by spots of a brightening yellow, nearly fluorescent, patchy on Olia's hands and face.

"What?"

"You look like you want something," Jenny said. The yellow grew. "What does yellow mean? On your skin?"

"Nothing of note," Olia said quickly. She could be wrong, but to Jenny it seemed like they were lying. They were always going yellow, but they would never explain what emotion it correlated to. It got more extensive when Jenny asked about it though. "Can I ask you something?"

"It's not something else about Earth or humans, is it?"

"N-no, nothing like that, nothing at all like that," Olia said. Jenny waited expectantly, but Olia didn't speak.

"...What?" It was as though they were struggling to get the words out. Jenny just frowned, puzzled. She hoped it wasn't something else to do with her injured feet, another attempt to get her to beg Evanlex for shoes she didn't care for. Maybe Olia was working on Evanlex's behalf, come to tell her something urgent. It briefly crossed her mind that Evanlex might have decided to sack her, perhaps she didn't bring in as much revenue as she thought? But in her time there, she'd only ever seen Evanlex fire one person, and that was for stealing money from the circus, a bit more severe than not being the star act. Jenny was under no impressions that she was the star of the show, the star was the closing act, Kyylan, a pretty phenomenal shape-changer. Olia remained silent, though.

"This soup. Don't you think it's great? I think it's great," they finally said.

"Uh… well, it's okay. I'd prefer if it had more meat in it," Jenny replied. They just nodded in an exaggerated fashion. All of the blue was gone from their skin now, and they were so yellow they might be a firefly. "I don't really hope for much when it comes to synthetic food, though." Transporting fresh meat around space was draining on time and money. It had to be dehydrated extensively – in which case taste suffered – or had to be dragged around at light speed, which always made it a bit metallic, and caused static shocks. Having your teeth electroshocked was incredibly unpleasant, and she'd rather avoid it. So synthetic slime it was, but it wasn't _so_ bad. It was more hygienic than all of the game she used to hunt, for starters. No ticks or lice swimming about in her bowl.

"I'll tell the chef."

"Tell her what?"

"That… that you think it's okay. She asked me to ask you," Olia said. Again, it sounded like a lie.

"Are you lying?"

"No! Why would I lie about that? That'd be… well, it'd be crazy, wouldn't it? Who would do something like that? It'd be completely pointless, _completely_. I never lie," Olia was covering for themselves, but covering for themselves about what, Jenny hadn't a clue. Then again, there was always the possibility that Olia _was_ telling the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and Jenny just couldn't deduce it.

"Did she not ask what _you_ think?"

"I just think she values your opinion more than mine. I'm always asking for battered huviens," Olia said, moping a little. A huvien was some kind of large, common insect on the planet Axxen. As best as Jenny understood it, it was like a dragonfly, but huge, and was the staple food for the space chameleons. Maybe she would try it one day, if she was every lucky enough to go to Axxen. The carnival didn't really head that way, though, or hadn't so far. God knew how Olia ever got picked up onto it.

"Tell her if you want, but I don't see what she can do about the lack of real meat," Jenny shrugged. She didn't have to spend five hours of her day stalking, hunting, killing, skinning, filleting and cooking her dinner, so a drop in taste was a small price to pay for the end of those gruelling activities which used to make up her life. Even the finest food of the Twentieth Century, that which Viola O'Hara allowed herself to palette, came with risk of polio or cholera.

"How's your foot?" Olia seemed eager to change the subject.

"It's fine, don't worry," Jenny assured her with a smile. The yellow had been dimming a little, fading to the green Olia appeared as most of the time, but when she said that it returned. What kind of weird emotional response was being triggered? It was surely a mystery she would be hard done by to fathom. "I'll clean up the blood tonight, when everyone's in bed, like I always do."

"I wish you would get shoes…"

Jenny sighed, "I know you do, but it doesn't bother me. The scars I have just show that I've lived, I've _been_ places, _done_ things. You know?"

"Not really. To me they just seem like you don't take care of yourself. It…"

"What?"

"Nothing." Jenny waited to see if Olia might say what had been on their mind a second ago. She had nearly finished her gruel now. At about three in the morning, she would make her way into the kitchen and heat up the leftovers and have her mid-night meal. That was the tricky thing about having an obscene metabolism and only sleeping once a week, she needed to consume a lot of very large meals. Although, when she lived with people like Utal, her 'large meals' didn't seem very large at all. It was only by comparison to humans that her diet became freakish. She was allowed access to the leftovers if she washed up all the utensils afterwards, and this suited her just fine, because she saw it as therapeutic. Besides, it wasn't like she had much else to do.

"Okay. But, they aren't your scars, so they're not for you to think about," Jenny told Olia. She stood up, climbing over the long bench attached to the table and picking up her empty bowl, "I have to go clean, anyway."

"Wait," Olia said quickly. Jenny raised her eyebrows at them. Yet again, they just didn't know what to say. Why ask to speak if you weren't going to? It was just weird. Maybe it was a custom from Axxen? "…be sure to tell her what you think of the food."

"Right. Sure. Will do. Always honest, you know me," she smiled again. Some of the yellowness came back to Olia for a second, but Jenny had left them and their particular brand of weird by that point. She didn't mention what she thought of the food to the chef because, as she kept pointing out, there was nothing to be done about it. Bags of synthetic nutrient paste were not the most versatile of ingredients, that was a fact, and there was only so much seasoning one could do to it. Jenny was not a fussy eater.

On her way back to the stores in the wings of the ring, where her bloody footprints began, she wondered why Olia was so bothered about how Jenny looked after herself. She looked after herself just fine, she thought. She gotten herself to twenty-four years old without having to regenerate, and that suited her fine. Who cared if she had a few cuts and bruises?

She didn't dwell on that particularly, though. Olia constantly proved themselves to be an enigma, one Jenny didn't think it was her business to solve. Privacy was a glorious thing, and people were always grateful when you allowed them some. No doubt her father would agree, would think she ought to live like she was made of glass, wouldn't approve of the reckless way she behaved. But as every month went by, the less she cared about him. The less she cared about a lot of things, it was like there was something missing from her life, and she knew what it was; a purpose.

As much as she liked acrobatics, it wasn't something she wanted to do for the rest of her life. And the way things were shaping up, the fact she hadn't aged at all since the day she was born, who knew how long that would be? Did Jenny really want to be jumping between ropes, balancing along wires, falling and flying and falling again, forever? She didn't think she wanted to that any more than she wanted to be cleaning her own blood off of scuffed metal floors all night. She sat cross-legged, scrubbing blood from the ground, contemplating her life and herself. That was what she spent most of her time doing, anyway, she had yet to find something so constantly distracting that she could avoid it. Probably, if she was living in a time machine-cum-spaceship, she'd never get bored, she'd never retreat into the lonely recesses of her own mind. And, god, was she lonely sometimes.

Jenny was right in the middle of cleaning her footprints in the stores, the water in the soapy bucket next to her getting cold and pink-coloured, when she heard a clatter in the room. Of course, the room was very large and had some pretty astounding acoustics, not to mention was chock-full of precariously balanced and heavy objects, all crammed onto shelves and each other. She figured something had just fallen nearby, so she thought nothing of it. Until she heard another noise, a much more organic noise, like someone or something grunting, then a very strange, kind of soft noise, followed by a cacophony of metallic bangs as things definitely _did_ fall over. But they weren't falling over of their own accord, she was now sure. She dropped her soiled sponge in the murky, lukewarm bucket and stood up, wiping her soapy right hand on the hem of her sweater, going to investigate.

A ruke – small common vermin, bright blue in colour and resembling a mouse, but with three eyes and six legs and a stubby tail – dashed passed her, and she dodged it. Those things got everywhere and they chewed everything that wasn't sealed away in a titanium crate. Evanlex had, years ago, stopped trying to get rid of them. The carnival ship was so huge, and they always needed to be on the move so that they actually made money, it was practically impossible to eradicate the rodent-like aliens completely. They just kept having babies, and the babies kept having babies, so they invaded every crevice they could find, and when they couldn't find a crevice they hollowed out new ones for themselves with their teeth. But Jenny thought they were kind of cute, in their own way. Sometimes she fed them, not that she told anybody that. Everyone else hated them, but she didn't really see why they ought to be exterminated just because they were stupid and an inconvenience. The usual thing to do when someone on the ship saw a ruke was to immediately kill it; step on it, or something. She didn't do that, though, she pitied it, and she was much too curious in what the noises had been and what had scared the ruke away to begin with.

She came around the corner of one of the shelves – the place was like a library, but with circus supplies rather than books – to see an entire shelf had been pushed over. And that just didn't happen on its own. She sighed and went about picking it back up, keeping a careful ear out for anything suspicious. She was still a pretty difficult person to get the drop on, though, especially if she was expecting it. Which she was, because who could have pushed this whole shelf over? Even _she_ might struggle a little, and she had exceptional strength. Well, Jenny Acallaris had exceptional everything. There was nobody to be seen, though, nobody except for the ruke, which must have been nesting, or something, and got spooked by the noise.

Then the unthinkable happened.

This was not just a simple case of somebody knocking a shelf over and then getting out of dodge because they didn't want to be caught and chewed out for their mistake, but they also couldn't be bothered trying to clean it up. She lifted a large cape (she didn't know who it belonged to, there were a _lot_ of capes and cloaks and shawls in that room) and saw a body. A dead one. The body of Kyylan, the shape-changer, with his throat torn out by what looked like a pretty enormous, clawed hand. Probably why she hadn't heard a scream. But what could possibly have done that? She didn't know just by looking at it, but she knew that it must have been massive, and she definitely didn't see any massive monster in the storage hall. She took a few steps back, not wanting to contaminate the crime scene, knowing Kyylan was so dead she couldn't possibly do anything for him. The poor guy. He was cocky and full of himself, but he was a good person, she was sure. Then again, Viola used to tell her she had too much compassion, that she thought _everyone_ was a good person. How did the Earth phrase go again? - Innocent until proven guilty. That was how she was with people. No snap-judgements.

Jenny stared around the room, looking for the culprit of this crime. It had just been a few seconds ago – how could they possibly have gotten away so fast? It was impossible. Especially when they were so obviously gigantic. But the star performer was dead, regardless, so this didn't bode well. Forced to take matters into her own hands, at least until she told somebody else what was going on, she left Kyylan's body and prowled up and down the shelves. But nobody jumped out at her, nobody caught her eye, nothing even moved except for her own shadow. How could that be? She was sure she had seen Kyylan in there less than ninety minutes ago.

After ten minutes of searching, she resolved that whoever had done this was gone. Gone, or hiding. But who could hide so well? No-one in the carnival could turn invisible. Well, no-one except… but no. Olia might be a chameleon, but there was no way on Messaline they could have done this. They didn't have the resolve, motive, or capability. Sure, Olia had never exactly seemed fond of Kyylan, but a lot of people weren't fond of Evanlex's pampered star performer. In fact, a lot of people _really_ weren't fond of him. Was that motive? Motive for about thirty different people? The only person she was absolutely sure had not killed Kyylan were herself and Evanlex, as much as she didn't want to think Olia had anything to do with it. But there was one way to find out if Olia was in the stores and hiding or elsewhere, and that involved going to their room and finding them, so that was what Jenny planned to do. Olia, then Evanlex, to tell him the bad news.

She slipped out of the room, leaving the bucket behind, half-jogging down the empty corridors. It was late at night, almost one in the morning, nobody was out and about, they were all in their rooms. At least, she hoped they were. Perhaps yelling for everyone to come out would eliminate some suspects? Then again, it would probably also cause chaos, unless it were a mass conspiracy to murder Kyylan. They might not like him, but they would get paid less if he wasn't around. And besides, murder wasn't very nice. And she liked to think the people she lived and worked with _were_ nice. They always seemed to be nice to her, anyway. Ultimately, Jenny resolved that calling for people to vacate their bedrooms so they could be questioned wasn't the best course of action. It would cause panic, and also, Evanlex wouldn't be happy with her to see her taking charge in this sensitive tragedy, the killer still at large. He was a bit of a control freak, the power-hungry sort, a firm but fair leader. She may have found the body, but this was not her business and she was no detective, clever as she was.

So, Jenny made a beeline for Olia's room, the first and only person she wanted to tell all of this to, and knocked on the door softly. For a brief moment nobody answered, and she feared the worst. Then she thought maybe Olia just hadn't heard, if they were there. She reached up, ready to knock again, but Olia opened the door anyway.

"Oh, thank god," she immediately said, relieved, "Can I come in? I have to come in," Jenny pleaded. Olia began turning yellow again, but Jenny had more important things on her mind than deducing colour-based emotional responses in chameleons. Olia said, of course she could come in, she could always come in, and then stepped aside. Jenny generally didn't like going into Olia's room. It was pretty weird. It was always boiling hot and everything seemed damp, and she refrained from sitting down. She just paced in her socks, whatever the substance in the room was soaking through the fabric. She figured it was some kind of lizard-originating secretion, or something to make sure the room stayed hot, so she didn't mention it. After all, she didn't understand the struggles of being cold-blooded.

"What's going on?" Olia asked.

"I just – I was just cleaning, like I said I would, and there was this bang, and now Kyylan's dead," Jenny told them quickly. She didn't warn Olia of the nature of the information she was about to disclose, but it was much too important to worry about shocking them too much. They would be shocked regardless, unless, of course, they were the killer. But it didn't look like they had left their room at all since supper ended.

" _What_?"

"Kyylan, he's dead."

"Dead?"

"Yeah."

"Seriously!?" they exclaimed. They were going pink.

"Yes! He had his throat torn out, died right while I was in the room, I think," Jenny explained. She kept pacing, Olia went to sit down on the edge of their bed.

"So you saw who did it? Who killed him?" they asked.

"No. I didn't see anyone, or hear anyone, I have no idea who it was," Jenny told her, "I didn't know what to do, so I came straight here, to see if you… I mean, to see you." She didn't want Olia to know she had been a little suspicious of them. Her suspicions seemed irrelevant now anyway, Olia didn't need to know a single thing about them. What was she supposed to think, though? Mysterious death, no visible culprit? Unluckily for Jenny, she underestimated Olia's intelligence. Well, they were always so odd when they were around Jenny, but in the panic it was like talking to a whole other person. One who didn't slowly turn yellow whenever Jenny was within ten feet of them.

"You thought it was me?" Olia asked. Perhaps they didn't ask it, perhaps they just stated it, knowing immediately for it to be true. Why didn't they suspect that Jenny wouldn't just use their friendship to come and confide? Wasn't that what friends did? She didn't know, she didn't think she'd ever had a _real_ friend, one who didn't want something out of her.

"No! Of course I didn't… don't you think we should go find Evanlex?" Jenny suggested hopefully. She had stopped moving, was stood still letting the damp soak through her socks onto her freshly bandaged feet.

"You mean so you can bring your prime suspect to right under his nose? Trick me into coming with you so that I can't get away? Frame me? Maybe _you're_ the one who killed Kyylan, for all I know, you just said you were in the room with him alone," Olia argued.

"You must know that I would _never_ kill someone," Jenny told them seriously, "Never." And she meant it, she wouldn't. She had only killed once, and she didn't want to ever do it again. Sending someone into nothing like that… it had changed her. As the years rolled by, what innocence she felt she had was being chipped away, little by little. What sort of person would she be in another decade? In ten? If she would even live that long?

"But it's alright for you to think the same thing about me? I thought you knew me. I thought _I_ knew _you_ , I thought I…"

"What?" Jenny asked.

"It doesn't matter what I thought," Olia snapped, "For you to come in here and just accuse me of murder-"

"I didn't accuse you of murder! And who's to say I _do_ know you!? I don't know anything about you! You seem to act like a different person around everybody else than you do around me, what does that say about you? Are you more than just a physical chameleon, are you a social one as well? Maybe you _did_ kill Kyylan, and here you are, covering for yourself, painting me as some sort of psycho!" Jenny protested.

"So now _I'm_ the psycho?" Olia demanded, getting to their feet.

"How should I know? I don't really know you!"

"Our friendship doesn't even mean anything to you?"

"If you can call it a 'friendship.' I don't know if you acting weird all the time really counts."

" _Acting weird_?"

"Well what would you call it, hmm?" Jenny questioned, crossing her arms.

"Me?" Olia asked, their face falling a little, as though the anger was briefly stemmed, "I suppose I wouldn't call it anything, then, if you're going to be like that."

"And what's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"You've never even asked anything about me, Jenny, how can you complain when you don't ask? You're so closed off, you just sit in your bedroom and read books or mope around the kitchen and try to change the recipes! It's so hard for anybody to get through to you!"

"I don't ask because it's not my business! If someone wants me to know something, then they should tell me themselves. Otherwise I have no right to know, or to intrude," Jenny said.

"You're completely self-interested."

" _I'm_ self-interested? _Me_? Where's this even coming from!? I'm sorry about thinking it might be the person who can turn invisible who murdered someone! I don't really think I was jumping to conclusions!"

"If you're so obsessed about people telling you things, how about I tell you this: I'm in love with you, Jenny. And you spend so much time obsessing over how you think you're destined for greater things, about how you're 'lost in the universe,' you never even noticed!" Olia shouted at her, and Jenny was stunned into silence. Every thought about Kyylan disappeared from Jenny's mind. "Unbelievable. I wear all my emotions unwillingly plastered right across my face, and you still couldn't stop thinking about yourself for five seconds to figure it out."

"You're _in love with me_?" Jenny asked.

"That's what I said, isn't it?" Olia questioned coldly. All gone was the bumbling awkwardness, the shyness, the yellow. Was that what yellow meant? Yellow meant Olia _liked_ her? Did everybody else know that? And nobody ever even thought to tell her that she was being oblivious, being an idiot?

"No-one's ever been in love with me before…" she stared at the floor, spoke quietly. She couldn't meet Olia's eyes, their face, couldn't even look at them now.

"And they won't be for much longer – you're unbelievable. Kyylan's dead, and now you're obsessing over this. It's not important."

"Don't say you're not important," Jenny said.

"So you never pay attention to me at all before, and now because suddenly I have feelings for _you_ , I'm important? More important than our dead colleague? This isn't about me; this is about you. It's always about you, Jenny, _you, you, you_. What are people to you? Friends? Are they all just placeholders until you find this lost father? Until you find people who are 'worthy' of you?"

"Worthy? Of course not! I like everyone, I value everyone!" Jenny argued, "Especially you!"

"But it wasn't 'especially me' five minutes ago! You would have just sauntered off out of here at the next opportunity any day before now, and you still would. You think you're above every single person you've ever met – you think just because you saw the 'worst of humanity,' or something, it gives you a right to lord over them and everybody else! You're too used to them thinking you're special because you look like them and you can do fancy tricks. You're not special. You're just like the rest of us here, but you just can't get it through your head."

"I do not think I'm better than you all!" Jenny protested.

"Of course you do! Look at you already, playing detective instead of going right to Evanlex, wanting to be the one who brings the killer to justice so you can get a pat on the head."

"I just want to do the right thing!" Jenny yelled.

"The right thing for your ego, maybe! So you hang around here with the other rejects of polite society, pretending to be one of us, but you're not. You still don't fit in, you know, you don't fit in anywhere," Olia said, "And you never will if you don't get your head out of your rear-end. You don't know anything, anyone, you don't know how to be a person. You're just pretending, but you don't even know what you're pretending to be."

"Thanks! Thanks for this! This was really nice of you, Olia, you just decide to tell me you apparently like me, and then list my every flaw. At least, my every flaw in _your_ opinion," Jenny said, "What do you even seek to gain? What do you want from me?"

"I want you to get out of my sight! Out of my room!" Olia shouted. And with that, Jenny did. She didn't say another word, she just stormed out and marched away down the corridor, the door automatically closing behind her, heading straight for Evanlex's office. Except now, her entire view of her life, herself, her reality had been flipped on its head. She didn't know what she was doing, or why she was doing it, or why she was there. What was her goal in life? Find her father? Was she really obsessed, could Olia be right? Surely not. The thought of reuniting with the Doctor didn't occupy her every thought, she didn't pore over his myths and his legends every waking moment. She hadn't been basing her life around chasing a paternal ghost for a quarter of a century. Had she?

And then Jenny realised that Olia was right. She didn't know anything. She wasn't special, but she thought she was. She did think she had a greater purpose, she did think she should be doing something else. She shouldn't have been living in near-poverty working as a second-rate performer in a carnival, she should _be somebody_. Olia's words had the opposite effect on Jenny than their intention. She was planning out her future, thinking of decades. Having her eyes opened, knowing all this, how could she possibly stay with the circus after that? It had been a good stint, an adequate two years, but this was not the place Jenny Acallaris wanted to be. Acallaris wasn't the person she wanted to be, not anymore.

Her father wouldn't say in a carnival doing cheap tricks for two years, she was sure. Her father never stopped moving, never stopped learning. Maybe _she_ should never stop moving? Maybe she should dedicate her long life to charitable causes? Go and find some war, latch onto it and become a one-woman relief effort? She had liked patching up soldiers well enough during the Second World War, she could do that again. She could do that all over the place… She could become a doctor. A real doctor, not like her father. Learn about medicine, how to fix people. Learn about anything, about spaceships and physics and ancient history and science.

That was what she needed to do, Jenny realised. She needed to learn. Without knowledge, without a skillset beyond moonshine-brewing, fiddle-playing, game-hunting and acrobatics, could she even do anything useful? Could she even make a difference? Her father made a difference, the day she had been born, he had _ended a war_. And she had died to save him. Maybe Jenny wanted to end wars on her own, though, find her own conflicts to resolve. Starting with those conflicts inside herself. She needed to make him proud, and she needed to discover herself. Jenny didn't even know who she was.

She drew up to the door of Evanlex's office finally, though, late that night. Looking haunted, she knocked on the metal, she waited for him to answer. He didn't, so she knocked again. Then, fearing the worst, she just pressed the button so that she could enter the room herself. She didn't want the mysterious, invisible murderer to have gotten to Evanlex, too. What if somebody was picking them all off, one by one? What if, now, Olia was going to die? What if they were already dead, and Jenny had just left them to be the victim of whoever was stalking the spaceship's halls?

Her fears were unfounded, Evanlex was home, and alive. She nearly bumped into him on his way out of the shower in a bathrobe, that exceptionally tall and stern ringmaster.

"I'm so sorry," she apologised.

"What are you doing wandering in here so late, Acallaris!?" he demanded of her in a booming voice. That was his thing, whatever species he was (the name had a very odd kind of letter that, despite her miraculous linguistic capabilities, she could never pronounce or remember how to spell), his voice. He boomed through the ring as he made announcements, didn't even need a microphone to do it. It astounded her.

"Something's happened," she said, trying to collect herself enough to deliver this news. Evanlex was going to hate her after this, as though she were the person who had killed Kyylan. On the floor nearby, another ruke scurried past, like that one in the storage room.

"What is it?" he asked her, and she didn't speak, looking at the vermin. He shouted, "Out with it!" and she jumped and focused her attention back on him and her delivery.

"Kyylan's dead," she told him. He stared at her, and she stared back. She met his gaze and held it, though his expression turned sour and furious and sick. She couldn't look into Olia's eyes, but she could look into the twisted face of Evanlex as he discovered his star performer was dead.

" _Dead_?"

"In the storage room, he had his throat torn out," Jenny said, and Evanlex went to sit down in his chair, like he couldn't stomach what Jenny was telling him. Maybe he couldn't. "I'm sorry."

"Well who did it? Who else was there?"

"Nobody, it was just me, I don't know who did it," Jenny said.

"What do you mean, 'just you?'" he asked her coldly, gritting his teeth.

"I was cleaning, and I just heard this noise and went to look and found him, dead," she said, "I didn't see anyone there." Evanlex mulled this over. Her account blatantly painted _herself_ as Kyylan's killer, but why would she turn herself in like this? Hopefully he wouldn't see it that way, wouldn't see it as her pulling off a trick. She was getting tired of doing tricks.

"You didn't see anyone?"

"No, sir."

"Haven't you talked to that chameleon? The one who dotes on you?" Evanlex said, and she felt her hearts sting when he told her Olia 'doted' on her. "Maybe they thought they could take Kyylan's place as a shapeshifter, try to make themselves look like things…"

"It wasn't Olia," Jenny said stiffly, "They couldn't have made wounds like the ones I saw, his neck was ripped out, there was blood everywhere."

"Really?" Evanlex asked.

"Yes, really. It… the only person I can think of who could have physically done it is Utal," she said, "But Utal can't just disappear into thin air, and he's huge! I would have seen him. And I don't know why he would want to kill Kyylan, or anybody, anyway." But Evanlex didn't reply. He sat there, as though in deep thought, in his plush chair. Jenny just stood, her socks still damp and warm. She thought the wounds on her feet must have opened again, she must be bleeding. It wasn't worth it to be suffering these injuries every week for something she wasn't even passionate about, to perform feats that to her were easy.

"And you didn't see anybody? Nobody?"

"No, I keep telling you," she said.

"Not even something that didn't look like one of us? Something else?" he asked. Jenny paused, frowned.

"…What do you mean, something else…?" she asked slowly.

"Anything alive."

"There… there was a ruke," she answered, remembering, "It ran right past me."

"Did you kill it?" Evanlex asked her urgently.

"No… I know we're supposed to, but I think they're cute," she argued.

"CUTE!?" he bellowed, "You let the killer get away!"

"Excuse me!?" Jenny exclaimed, "How does a ruke tear somebody's throat out!?"

"How, indeed, Evanlex?" a smooth voice interrupted. Jenny and Evanlex both turned to see somebody leaning against the wall next to Evanlex's bed. Jenny jumped and stepped back, not knowing who this mysterious stranger was. They had shiny, blood-red skin that looked matte in the lighting, all-black, gleaming eyes like onyx stones, a bone structure that made their face look sharp and sculpted. They were humanoid, but very thin, with the usual two arms and two legs. Jenny recognised the species as a Wexilok, the same species as Kyylan. Kyylan's skin tone had always been a little more on the orange side rather than this dark red, though. For a split second, Jenny thought perhaps this _was_ Kyylan, and Kyylan had faked his death as some kind of joke.

"Ralyyx," Evanlex said. Jenny had heard that name before, she was sure of it.

"Isn't he the person you fired years ago for stealing money from the circus?" Jenny asked, realising where she remembered Ralyyx's name from; warnings she had gotten when she first joined about the consequences of stealing. Not that she intended on stealing, she would never steal if she could help it.

"I only took my dues," Ralyyx said, "You're the one who's _really_ stealing from this circus, who isn't paying people the amount they deserve."

"You were never one to understand fairness – and now to murder Kyylan? One of your own?"

"I don't even know him. He replaced me. He took everything from me, you didn't even change his moniker on the listings, and I was dumped in the middle of hyperspace at some crusty fuel depot!" Ralyyx argued, his smile vanishing. He moved slowly towards them and turned his twisted gaze on Jenny, but continued to address Evanlex, "I had a simple plan. Kill Kyylan, kill you, and replace you."

"You couldn't keep form for long enough to trick anyone. You were never a very good shape-changer," Evanlex spat. Jenny didn't think intimidating him was the best course of action – he could shapeshift into something that could kill them with one fell blow of its enormous fist. She was sure that was what had happened to Kyylan, that Ralyyx must have morphed into Utal, or something similar, and crushed him that way. And then had scurried past Jenny as the ruke, escaping and wending his way through the gnawed crevices of the carnival flotilla until he got to Evanlex's quarters.

"She ruined it. When did you stop letting your acrobats wear padded soles, Evanlex? If you had just let her, she wouldn't have been cleaning up her own bloody footprints. She wouldn't have witnessed anything. We could all have carried on, marvelling at the tragedy of Kyylan's murder, pinning it on Utal, the only one who would be able to smell the different scents, who would have been able to mark you as me," Ralyyx advanced. Jenny and Evanlex backed off, "It would have been the perfect crime."

"People have been trying to commit the perfect crime for tens of thousands of years," Jenny said.

"And a lot of them have," Ralyyx remarked, "And I would have joined them."

"Why not just get over it, Ralyyx? You always hated this life," Evanlex said, "Just leave now."

"I can't leave, we're in deep space, the only way out is death or success."

"A life for a life, seems fair," Evanlex said coldly.

"What? You can't kill him," Jenny interrupted, "You can't. You shouldn't kill anyone." Ralyyx laughed.

"This girl's soft."

"This is circus business, Acallaris, we settle it internally," Evanlex told her sharply.

"Just lock him up!" she argued, "Nobody has to die."

"Somebody already did," Evanlex growled. Ralyyx laughed, Evanlex darted to the other side of the room to his drawers, pulling them out and rifling through them, looking for something. Jenny was stuck in the middle of the room, between both sides. Ralyyx was going to kill Evanlex if Evanlex didn't kill him first, and vice versa. And there was Jenny, caught between, not wanting anybody to die.

"Just calm down! There must be a peaceful way to resolve this," she shouted.

"He threw peace out of the airlock when he murdered my star performer, girl," Evanlex said furiously, "The only way for justice to be served is for him to die." And then Evanlex turned around, holding a gun, a micro blaster, one that could be easily concealed. As soon as he pulled the gun on Ralyyx, Ralyyx made a lunge and grabbed Jenny tightly, holding her in front of him like a shield.

"Is it worth the risk of hitting your best acrobat to try and kill me?" Ralyyx jeered. Jenny struggled against him, Evanlex held up the gun and aimed it for Ralyyx. In front of her she saw his arms shift into those hulking grey ones of Utal, whatever his species was, keeping her pinned. She was strong, but she was finding it had to break free.

"Let me go, nobody has to die," Jenny said, but Ralyyx didn't budge, he just shifted his arm higher up so that it was against her neck, restraining her just hard enough so that she was stopped from speaking. Even breathing became tricky, but not impossible. She wildly tried to kick at his legs and his shins, but as soon as she clipped what she thought was an ankle with the bony heel of her foot, he tightened his grip, lifting her slightly off the ground.

"She's only trying to stop there being more bloodshed, Ralyyx, leave her alone," Evanlex ordered.

"Or what? What if I kill her, too? Use her body as a shield to get to your gun, crush you? I could wipe out the whole circus if I wanted," he said, as Jenny began to feel herself choking. This was not good, not at all. "Your whole legacy would belong to me."

"You wouldn't dare, you know these people," Evanlex said.

"I know you, as well, and I'll kill you just as quickly."

"Let her go. We can settle this another way."

"I think I might break her neck."

"Drop the girl!"

"Or what? You've never been a good shot. You could so easily miss and hit her instead of me." Jenny met Evanlex's eyes, gave him a pleading look. She couldn't breathe, her windpipe was being crushed, he whole head and face and lungs were starting to ache and burn.

"This is your last chance-"

"Do it!"

A gunshot ripped through the air.

* * *

Someone knocked meekly on the door into Jenny's room aboard the ship. It was nearly the morning, nearly time for routines to begin again, but Jenny was out of sync with her usual schedule. She was packing bags. Still haunted from the events of a few hours ago, she dropped the clothes she had been folding onto her bed and went to answer the door. There she found Olia, lightly yellow, looking nervous.

"Thank god you're alright," they said, and they threw their arms around her in a hug. She didn't hug back, though, she pushed them off. She hadn't forgotten the things Olia had said, near death experience regardless. "What? What's wrong?" Olia asked.

"What's _wrong_?"

"What are you doing…?" Olia questioned her carefully, seeing the mess the room was in, as though it had been completely upturned. Clothes and books and trinkets everywhere, and there on the bed was a large bag, just over half full.

"Packing," she answered shortly.

"Packing why? What happened? Somebody told me something about you, and Ralyyx, and Evanlex. What's going on, Jenny? Put that stuff down," Olia ordered her, but she didn't listen, she just went about her business. Olia, of all people, had no right to tell Jenny what to do anymore, no right to advise her. Not after the things she had said.

"Ralyyx is dead, Evanlex got a lucky shot," Jenny answered shortly. That was the truth, Evanlex had hit Ralyyx right in his head, and he had let go of Jenny and collapsed to the floor, nearly crushing her. At least she healed quickly, she was very nearly recovered from being asphyxiated. "He snuck on board and killed Kyylan, framed Utal for it, wanted to shift into Evanlex and ruin the circus."

"Oh. Well, it's good that he's dead, right? Why are you packing?" Olia kept asking her. She dropped her things again.

" _Good that he's dead_? In what world could it ever be good that he's dead? People don't need to die; nobody has the right to just take life away. Is the point of a prison to punish the person who did the crime or to keep the rest of society safe? We should have locked him up, should have put him in prison. It's where he belongs, not… not in the void. Not in all that nothingness," Jenny said, "So it's not good that he's dead, okay? It's not."

"He deserves to be punished."

"No, he _deserves_ to be forgotten about, and everybody else deserves to be safe with him shut away somewhere, without acting like gods who think they're justified to murder. Evanlex killed Ralyyx, that makes him no better because Ralyyx killed Kyylan," Jenny said, "That's why I'm leaving. I don't want to live with or work for anyone who condones that."

"What? Leaving? And going where?"

"I don't know, Olia, anywhere. I could go anywhere in time and space – why should I hang around here?"

"You've taken the opposite meaning from what I said than what I intended," Olia told her coolly.

"Well so what? Why should I listen to what you think? You weren't exactly nice about it. I don't belong here. I shouldn't be here," she threw things haphazardly into the bag, thinking of decades and eras of places where she could go, where she could find her place in the world. Maybe she should learn, go somewhere to get an education? There was only so much she could learn from reading books.

"You can't just go!"

"Yes, I can. I can leave, I can… I don't know, go to school? Find my father?"

"Why is it always about your father with you!?" Olia shouted, "He left you, Jenny! You just have to accept that."

"It's different! He didn't know I was still alive! If I could just find him, I'd… I know who I was. I don't have a clue now, none at all, but this isn't where I belong. There has to be somewhere I fit in. What do you want from me? You say you're in love with me, but you want me to change everything about myself? Drop all my goals, my ambitions? I want to travel, and to see things, and not to cut my feet on a highwire and do the same old tricks four times a week! It's driving me _insane_." She was just throwing things in the bag now, desperate to get away. This carnival was toxic.

"Why are you so obsessed with the idea of being special!?"

"Because I'm one of only two Time Lords left! I'm unique! I'm… a genetic anomaly, okay? I could do so much, I could be so much more, and you have absolutely no right to try and shape me into what you want. Nobody tells me what to do, alright? I make my own choices, and you trying to get me to stay, for _you_ , just makes me want to leave even more. You _were_ my friend, you weren't anything else, and that's the truth," Jenny told them. Harsh, possibly, but no amount of amorous revelations could change her feelings about someone. Controlling outbursts, though? They could. Olia was not the person she thought they were.

Jenny Acallaris was already dressed, all ready to leave, her feet bandaged up again, all of her keepsakes safe in her bag. She gave up trying to cram all of the books she had accumulated into it, left a lot of her spare clothes lying around. She only took the important things, like Emmett, and she zipped the bag closed with Olia still lingering nearby, as though Jenny were about to pull a romantic declaration out of thin air and they would somehow match up with whatever fairy tale Olia had conjured in their head.

"You cannot just disappear!"

"I can! I can and I will, that's my prerogative. Get out! Leave me alone! You'll never see me again, most likely. Forget I existed, make yourself feel better about the fact _you're_ one of the reasons I'm going. Mark my words," Jenny said, finding the vortex manipulator underneath her pillow and programming in her destination, picking up her bag once she had strapped it to her wrist, "I _will_ find my father. I'll find the Doctor. And then I'll be where I belong." She hit the button and disappeared in a bright blue flash, leaving the Novis Carnival Flotilla behind for good.


	4. Young

**Young**

 _HAV Nausicaa, Polaris, 10_ _th_ _of May, 4880_

It was Carver's birthday. He was twenty-nine, she reckoned, from listening to the quips about him only having a 'year left of youth' – which she found very amusing, personally. Flagons of the cheapest, Alliance-stock alcohol – something green and barely more than a soft drink, the Alliance disapproved so highly of their crewmen getting too drunk – kept being raised and splashed all over the long, metal tables in the dining hall of the _Nausicaa_. She stood in the shadows, merely observing, vicariously enjoying these celebrations of Carver still being alive. That was all she saw birthdays as, really; _congratulations, you're still alive!_ Her own, she no longer celebrated. She kept note of them, she knew how old she was (sixty-two, in fact), but she didn't feel like birthdays applied to her. July 24th was arbitrary.

But still, she liked watching them celebrate, all those privates and corporals, the enlisted men all gathered together. They weren't just celebrating Carver still being alive, though – they were celebrating all of them being alive. They were on their way to Nostraleo, an enormous Alliance city which orbited the planet on the furthest edge of Polaris, the system they were in. A system at war. It was this war they were returning from, going to Nostraleo for shore-leave. They were celebrating their own lives, and they were grieving for their lost brothers and sisters in arms the way they would want them to. Jenny was not complaining; these festivities were a welcome break from the extensive rumours circulating around the fact the princess of the Nomatee had allegedly gone missing five days ago. It was a good thing they were now heading away from Deftan, because the Nomatee had been making a big push back in response, like the Alliance had somehow managed to kidnap her.

The soldiers had just broken into a rowdy bout of _For He's a Jolly Good Fellow_ , and some of the woman were trying to convince Carver he ought to stand on their shoulders, when somebody near the door whistled astonishingly loudly, making her flinch. The singing died down, aside from one young girl Jenny knew was fresh out of the Alliance training academy, who was a little too drunk to notice what was going on around her. Carver himself, stood on one of the benches and about to relent to the requests to lift him up above everybody else's heads, fell over, and was caught in rather an emasculating manner by one of the burlier female soldiers, a woman called Pri. She liked Pri, but Pri often took one look at her and resolved they had nothing in common, because Jenny was small and it was generally thought she was only twenty-four years old.

The whistle had come from a surly and embittered lieutenant, most likely resentful that he hadn't been invited along to join in these festivities. He glared around at them all, and she still lurked, observing, in her corner, leaning quietly on one of the platinum support beams.

"What the hell do you all think you're doing?" he demanded. He, a generally ill-looking fellow with a pale complexion, dark hair and an Irish accent (the only person she had heard speak with an Irish accent since leaving Planet Earth in 1945), was a higher ranking officer than all of them. In fact, aside from herself, there wasn't one other officer in the room. They were all enlisted. "How did you get this stuff? You need an officer's permission to get at the intoxicant store room."

"It's Carver's birthday, sir," the young, drunken girl, whose name she did not recall, said heartily. Then she raised her shiny, silver tankard and slurred out the beginnings of _Happy Birthday_.

"I don't care if it's every last one of you's birthdays," the lieutenant, Cargill, said coldly, looking around at all their inebriated faces, "Without a senior officer's permission, taking this stuff is an offence worthy of dishonourable discharge. Especially during wartime." Noises of objection.

" _You're_ the dishonourable one!" the drunk newbie shouted. She was going to get herself in a lot of trouble, at this rate. She didn't address Cargill as sir, and she badmouthed him. To his face. Austin Cargill might be one of the least-agreeable people she had ever met, but she had a certain respect for the rules and the hierarchy of the Homeworld Alliance. Some pairs of eyes in the room were now trailing over her, judging her for her silence, as she studied the situation. Cargill did not know she was there.

" _Me_ dishonourable? I'm not the one committin' treason," he said. He was enjoying this, "If we were in the sea, I'd throw you in the drink. Leave it up to chance if we even decide to fish you out again. But I suppose locking you in the storeroom you got these drinks from in the first place until you sober up enough to be punished _properly_ might have to-"

Jenny, finally, cleared her throat, and Cargill jumped as he had been approaching the young girl, who must just be freshly eighteen and still caught up the romance joining the Homeworld Alliance military and going off to faraway places to defend those who couldn't defend themselves.

"I let them into the storeroom," Jenny said, "I've been here the whole time, supervising them. Don't you dare go anywhere near that girl, _Lieutenant_ ," she drawled his rank to remind him where they stood. He had thought he was the highest ranking officer in the room, thought he held all the power, that nobody could stop him. Jenny didn't trust him alone with that girl. She had no reason to suspect he would be very untoward with her, but he was… slimy. Cargill met her eyes, glared, and she smiled in response.

" _She_ misspoke to a superior officer, while intoxicated," Cargill told her.

"I think you mean, 'she misspoke to a superior officer while intoxicated – _Major_ ,'" Jenny corrected him. She still smiled pleasantly. "What, exactly, was this 'proper punishment' you had in mind?" She couldn't destroy all respect the troops had for him (if they _did_ have any, that was) by actually forcing him to repeat the sentence. He didn't speak. "The last I checked, locking people in storerooms because you think there's no-one around to stop you isn't in the list of appropriate punishments the Alliance condones."

"It's still misbehaviour." Jenny raised her eyebrows at him, and he added, "Major." He was very angry now, going quite red.

"And it happened while _I_ was supervising, so _I'll_ arrange her punishment, not you, Lieutenant. I think your work is done here. Hopefully Carver is too drunk to remember you spoiling his twenty-ninth birthday party," she said. Clenching his jaw, Cargill nodded, and briskly went to walk out of the room, "Where do you think you're going?"

"You told me my work is done here, Major," he said through gritted teeth.

"I don't think it's done until you've wished Carver a happy birthday," Jenny said.

"Oh, you can't be-"

"You're not being insubordinate towards a superior officer are you, Lieutenant? I think that sort of behaviour warrants a dishonourable discharge, or being locked in the cold storeroom all night." Cargill met her gaze again with a mixture of pleading and absolute fury, but she just crossed her arms, still leaning, looking quite relaxed, on the beam. Stiffly, full of rage, Austin Cargill turned to Carver.

"Happy birthday."

"Happy birthday what?" Jenny entreated.

"Happy birthday _Sergeant Carver_ ," Cargill almost spat. Then when she smiled he hurried out of the room as fast as he could. The room erupted in cheering as soon as the automatic door slid closed behind him, cheering which she was very quick to quell, ordering silence.

"He's right, you've all gotten too rowdy," she said, "I think it's about time to call it a night." And because she had defended them, because they saw her more as one of them than they did Cargill, and because despite her niceties she still had a commanding authority, they did as she ordered. Somebody went to try and pull the young girl who had nearly suffered at Cargill's hand out of her seat, where she was slumped over the table. "Leave her," Jenny ordered, walking over, and they did, "But – what's her name?"

"Private Adilai," the soldier, a young man, answered her.

"Right. Tomorrow morning, Private Adilai will wash up all your tankards. You go tell Razzo that," Razzo was the ship's cook, "Tell him under Major Young's orders nobody is to touch the dirty tankards because the Private will wash them before breakfast." The soldier nodded, and promptly the room was completely deserted, left a mess. It was midnight. They would get into port at six o'clock in the morning, and everyone aboard the _Nausicaa_ would be free to do as they wished for forty-eight hours. Except for Private Adilai, who was going to wash the tankards.

The girl did not know how to handle her alcohol, Jenny observed, standing by the side of the table with her arms crossed. That stuff they'd been drinking was more juice than booze, and she should know; she did used to make it, after all. After making moonshine for Viola for more than half a decade, she would never forget how to expertly carry out the distillery process. She couldn't tell if Adilai was asleep or not. The girl seemed lost. She hadn't tried to follow anybody out, and generally, she was quiet. Hence why Jenny didn't know her name – which Jenny herself viewed as an outrage, because she tried to know the names of everyone under her command. Feeling sorry for Adilai, Jenny sighed and dropped her arms to her sides, and then she went about gathering up all the tankards.

There were at over fifty of them, strewn messily all about the room, lying in sticky green puddles where spillages had occurred, smelling somehow sweet but bitter at the exact same time. You never really knew what sort of a flavour synthetic sustenance was going to have, though. She ate more or less the same meals every day, and they always tasted slightly different. And while she did all this, stacking all the dirty utensils up by the enormous sink, Adilai didn't do anything. Jenny was puzzled by this. Humans, she had realised a few decades ago, were strange.

Nearly forty years ago, after seeing the devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – not to mention the horrors of the holocaust – she had sworn of humanity. She had left them behind with a foul taste in her mouth and had run away to the future to become an acrobat in a space circus. But after that, she had spent ten years of the intermittent period at school, had acquired three degrees; advanced astrophysics, advanced mechanical engineering, and late-period Atelerixian history (which was significantly less useful than the previous two, but which she had enjoyed.) The University of Atelerix had the biggest library of _any_ university in that entire galaxy, and she had spent ten years poring over their books to scrape together clues to the whereabouts of her father. And during that time she had learnt that every species had massacres like those she had witnessed on Earth, every species went to war with each other, and almost never for that good of a reason.

Did it then seem hypocritical of her to now be in the armed forces herself? Part of her travelling to the Forty-Ninth Century to join the Homeworld Alliance had been, yes, to spite her father, whom she still could not find, and had not – to her knowledge – tried to find her. But being a soldier was in her blood, as a Time Lord (a species who had, she learnt, wiped themselves out), and as a product of Messaline's progenation machines. And besides, she had not killed anybody since joining. Her very fast and unheard of rise through the ranks up to Major was because of her sharp mind, her unmatched skills as a tactician, her ability to orchestrate complex operations with zero casualties. She saw that as noble. Most people saw _her_ as a mystery. Like the aforementioned Pri, for instance, who viewed Jenny like a child.

She knew that, behind her back, they made fun of her name. _Young_. Because she was so young. She let them. She had chosen the name of Young for herself now as a joke, as well, just a joke to herself because of how old she was. If she was a human, she could retire, she would be a pensioner. She could move to Florida (as Viola had once told her all old people move to) and live by the beaches. No, she was not young. Her superiors and the Alliance knew this, but her underlings did not. The Homeworld Alliance wasn't human specific, if it was, it would be called the rather more imperialistic _Human_ Alliance. Centuries ago, aliens had begun migrating to Earth, turning the entire planet into that vision of the great mixing pot. What was one Time Lord slipping through the mix? Well, she knew what she was – she was too 'valuable' an asset to the higher-ups to be put into field combat, really, and she hadn't seen much of it at all. Not ground combat, at least. Before moving to the Ground Force, she had risen to become a Commodore in the Star Fleet, renowned for her skills as a pilot. Though, she was careful not to brag about that. She liked the soldiers finding her mysterious.

Yet now, the tables were turned. Adilai was the one being found mysterious. Jenny wondered why she had joined the Alliance – if she had a personal stake in the battles raging on Deftan, the planet they had left behind for their shore-leave. Maybe it was as simple for Adilai as it was for Jenny; a wholesome desire to do good, and a struggle to think of any other way to do so that didn't involve joining some sort of 'peacekeeping' organisation, or becoming a vigilante. Then again, perhaps it was for the money. Or perhaps Adilai was a bloodthirsty killer.

Once Jenny had collected up all the tankards, her attention turned to all the mess. She didn't want to make Adilai clean up all those spills as well. And then, sighing, Jenny realised it was _her_ responsibility to deal with that, seeing as she had been the one who had let the soldiers at the booze to begin with. Then the dilemma rose – ought she do that now, or later? Before the stains were all too sticky to peel off the surfaces easily?

She decided that the matter of Adilai had to be taken care of first, and so Jenny went to shake the girl's shoulders to wake her up as she slumbered quite peacefully with her cheek pressed against the cold table. When she lifted her head up it left a red mark. She was drowsy and tipsy, and it was with some difficulty that Jenny, curious about this girl's origins, hauled her out of her seat and half-carried her towards the large industrial elevator that went to the commanding officers' quarters two decks above. And, being as nobody else was using her bed at present, that was where she left the girl, quite peaceful, before disappearing back into the mess hall to clean up all the spills during the night.

* * *

Okay, she admitted it, it was a lapse in judgment. She should not have gone back down to the galley and washed up all the tankards while the girl slept, she should have stuck to the punishment. But she was just too curious about this girl, this girl who reminded her so much of herself in an unusual way, that she thought of something more interesting and worthwhile. After all, what would washing up tankards teach anybody? Nothing. It would just make them resentful. And if she enforced the chore on herself, she saw it as good discipline. She could not really resent herself, nor did she have anything else to do.

"Where am I?" was the first thing Private Adilai asked when she awoke in an unknown room aboard the _Nausicaa_. A very understandable thing to ask. Jenny often asked herself the same question, but in a more existential way, a sort of, _what am I doing here, what's the point of all this_ type of thing. She was eating porridge out of a cup. She had a lot of food in her room, of course, because she ate a lot of food, and she didn't want to push all of her alien expenses onto the Alliance. It wasn't like she spent her wages on much else, anyway. She did not drink, she did not have a family, and nor was she all that keen on material possessions. Not the ones you bought, anyway. The ones she collected gradually as the decades rolled on, yes, she was a very big fan of those.

"Just in my room," Jenny answered, paying slightly more attention to her porridge as she tried to scrape some of the bits with honey together and get those onto her spoon. Without the honey, military-brand ration-porridge didn't taste of anything. Adilai gave a start.

"M-major Young?" she exclaimed, sitting up, "What's going on?"

"You seemed like you needed help," Jenny answered, lifting the metal cup to squint into it better. She finally got a large spoonful of porridge with a great globule of golden honey sticking the oats together in the middle of it and ate it gladly. Adilai was very confused, but Jenny finally gave up with the porridge after that, finding no more gilded chunks within. She put it down on her desk, which was covered in paperwork (and stay dots of honey she was going to have to clean up later) and faced the girl properly. "Private Adilai?" she asked.

"Yes ma'am," Adilai saluted immediately. She smiled.

"We've been docked in Nostraleo for half an hour," Jenny said, "You don't have to salute, we're all on shore-leave." Then she cleared her throat. "You insulted Major Cargill last night at Carver's party. Not very adept at handling your liquor, eh? Bet you've never really had it before, have you?" Adilai shook her head, and Jenny turned away again to search through her drawers for something. She muttered to herself, "Could've sworn I've got some cashews in here…" Jenny was in a terrible habit of talking to herself when she was alone, and because she was alone more often than she wasn't her bad habit persisted to whenever she was in limited company.

"But why am I here?" Adilai asked.

"Oh, I brought you here," Jenny said, finally finding a half-empty bag of cashew nuts buried in the bottom of one of her drawers and dragging it out. Her drawers were rather messy, and would be a haven for mice, were there any aboard the ship. It was quite easy to keep mice off ships and space stations, though, really. Although there had once been an incident where somebody snuck some hamsters on board an Alliance vessel and they mated ferociously, but that was before Jenny's time and she didn't even know if it was true. What sort of person would risk bringing hamsters into warzones to begin with? "I was going to make you wash up all the tankards from last night, but I thought of something else that might help you a bit more."

"Help me what?"

"With your discipline. Can't just go around getting drunk because you've never seen alcohol before after all," Jenny said to her, biting down onto one of the nuts. She held out the bag, "Do you want a cashew?" Adilai frowned.

"Um… am I trouble?"

"Sort of," Jenny shrugged, "You remind me a bit of me when I was younger."

"You still are young," Adilai said, then she checked herself, "If, uh, you don't mind me pointing it out, Major. Major Young."

"That's just a joke," she said, "My own private joke, I guess. Anyway, since you were consuming our hard-earned requisitions so liberally, I thought it might benefit you to tag along with me and see how long it takes to replenish them."

"Are you taking away my shore-leave?" Adilai asked.

"Some of it," said Jenny, "Which is entirely within my right as your superior officer."

"This just because I told Cargill to shut up!?"

"What were you going to do instead?" Jenny asked.

"…I don't know…" she admitted. Jenny didn't say aloud, but she had thought so. Jenny didn't know what to do with her shore leave, either, that was why she filled her time doing the requisitions and some other errands on Nostraleo. Adilai could turn out dangerous, though; she could become a loose cannon if left unchecked. In a way, Jenny had to be grateful to Viola for trying to 'tame' her, the 'wild thing' that she was. At least she had some discipline to go along with her piles and piles of resent.

"Where are you from?" Jenny asked.

"Mars," Adilai answered.

"Oh, really? I've never been to Mars," Jenny said. She would like to go one day.

"…It's not that great," Adilai said, clearly unsure about whether she could speak freely or not. "It's just dust, really."

"What's wrong with dust?"

"It's boring."

"Is it?" Jenny asked, which rendered Adilai confused and silent.

"Where are you from?" she asked. Jenny paused.

"Nowhere special. Far away," she said, sighing. She didn't really know where she was from. She felt no loyalty to Messaline, nor Tungtrun, nor Earth in particular. A transient state of life suited her just fine, the moving about she got by serving with the Homeworld Alliance was more satisfying than loitering in swamps for twenty years had been. She nearly preferred the army to the circus.

"Mars is quite far away, right?" she sounded unusually unsure.

"I'm not really from anywhere," Jenny said, continuing to be enigmatic, as was her style. She kind of liked it, leaving people clueless about her. Then again, there was not a lot about Jenny to be clued in _about_ in the first place.

"How can you not be from anywhere? Where were you born?"

"Don't ask me so many questions, Private," Jenny said in a clipped way, without emotion. She diverted her attention for a few seconds to her cashew nuts again. She didn't like to tell people off for just asking questions, but she had her own interests to protect. There were no laws against aliens joining the Homeworld Alliance, and so her superiors knew that she was other, but if the enlisted men and the lower-ranked officers found out she wasn't a human she would lose a great amount of their respect. She wasn't lying to them, simply letting them believe a falsehood she had done nothing really to perpetuate. Apart from looking like a human, of course, but that wasn't _her_ fault.

"I sort of… thought I would just stay on the ship today," Adilai said.

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you got drunk and badmouthed Cargill. Listen, I don't like Cargill more than anyone else here, and he's always hated me for some reason, but you have to respect the chain of command," Jenny explained, "It's a food chain, and you're sitting at the bottom for now." A strange look of relief flickered across Adilai's face. "Don't tell anyone I don't like him."

"Everyone knows you don't like him, Major," Adilai informed her.

"Well if 'everyone' ever asks you, you've heard otherwise, got it?"

"Is that a direct order to lie?"

"That, erm…" she paused. This was an internal affairs investigation waiting to happen.

"I'm… joking."

"Uh… good. Just… forget about all that." Jenny reached a paw back into her bag of nuts and came up short, and peered into it to just see dust and broken fragments of cashews. She had run out. She was going to have to buy more, but those stupid things took up more ration tokens than were sensible, in her opinion. There were some things you could get in abundance, like potatoes and milk substitute, with the petty ration tokens the Alliance doled out to its soldiers, but nuts? Those things were extortionate no matter when or where you were. "You've got half an hour to have a wash and get dressed, then we're going to Nostraleo."

"Right…" Adilai said, getting out of the bed very quickly.

"And wear boots, you'll have to carry things," Jenny advised her as she left. Adilai did not seem thrilled at the prospect of having to carry things. Then again, who really liked to? Except for Jenny, she didn't mind, there was no such thing as too much exercise, and she enjoyed being helpful. Private Adilai left Jenny alone with her thoughts after that, which was how Jenny was usually left. Alone. In all her transience, the only constant was herself. She was very keen not to regenerate and lose herself again.

* * *

Nostraleo was a rather enigmatic place, in the way that its exact category proved tricky to determine. In the way that all cities grow from one dense and purposeful locus, so had Nostraleo, which had begun life as nothing more than a forward station on the rim of Polaris. It was unusual because on Earth it would be the equivalent of a capital city springing out of a gas station, and now its bulbous, platinum shape grew, tumorous, on the star system's fringe. Additions kept being made, of course, it had to expand further and further towards dark space, but these concessions did not increase the painfully finite amount of space to aptly house the tens of thousands of refugees now within its belly. So, it was one of those jobs that wasn't flat-out a space station or a colony in its own right, and it was a regular mixing pot of alien species all currently fleeing the tyranny the Nomatee were enforcing throughout Polaris. That was why Jenny liked it. It was a veritable theme park for drifters, lowlifes, lost souls and the opportunistic, and she counted herself in each of those types. It attracted ruffians of every variety, and was rather a bleak place to have shore-leave. Not that anyone cared, because there was a lot of gambling and the drinks were cheap.

" _This_ is Nostraleo?" Adilai asked her when they left the _Nausicaa_ to enter the large docking bay, the permanent night stars far above them. What must it be like to grow up in a place like that, Jenny wondered? A place where 'night' and 'day' were nothing more than states of mind, rather than the inarguable natural order of things. But it was hard to find places that didn't try to synthesise daylight, to replicate Earth in the most un-Earthly of locations. Adilai, clearly, did not think much of that little sector of Nostraleo; of course she didn't, the docks only rated slightly higher than the slums themselves in terms of criminal activity. Major Young, out of an old relic of comradery within her, turned a blind eye to the smugglers operating out of there. It was an army port, people were always going to exploit it.

"You haven't been?" Jenny asked, "Where did you sign up for the Alliance, then? The last recruits to the _Nausicaa_ came from here."

"Oh," said Adilai. Jenny narrowed her eyes at the girl, who was taller than she was herself. "Maybe I just didn't see this part." It was the only part, Jenny thought to herself. Maybe Adilai's head was still scrambled from the alcopops last night; it would not surprise her if her drink had been spiked. Things like that happened often enough for Jenny to not be caught off-guard by them. Then again, lots of people joined the Alliance with secrets, to hide from things. Was she not one of them? In that instance, she could not justify prying.

"Okay, first on the agenda is to find something to drink," she began, leading Private Adilai back through the docks, which were bustling and smelt of engine fuel and gunpowder. The pink glow of Polaris hugged the stars in the sky outside. "Something completely, utterly, _non_ -alcoholic. Don't want any alcohol when we go back to Deftan, they can get their fix here. Carver's birthday was a one-off; there've been about half a dozen promotions this week, too. Wouldn't have been fair not do anything to commemorate when we're going back into war in forty-eight hours."

"What about just water?"

"Water's bad for morale, nobody just wants to drink water."

"Soda?"

"Nothing carbonated," she said, talking as she walked briskly and kept careful watch of Adilai to make sure she could only _just_ keep up, "Space flight isn't good for bubbles, really – I once saw a barrel full of energy drink spring a leak in zero gravity, couldn't be sorted out until after it had already made all the floors and walls sticky and badly affected the air filter. No, still fruit juice is what we need. That and more coffee."

"Is morale boosting in your job description?"

Jenny laughed, "No, but it's important. Keep the soldiers happy. Some of them could die when we go back to Deftan – as an officer in the organisation ordering them into danger to begin with, isn't it right that if it comes down to it that their last hours are as comfortable as possible?"

"Does Cargill care about that?"

"Lieutenant Cargill doesn't care about anything except himself," Jenny said coolly, "He's due for a promotion when we leave Nostraleo, too."

"That would make him a Major, though. What if he tries something again like he did last night? You wouldn't have the authority to stop him."

"There are ways to stop people that don't involve 'authority.' I have a mean sucker punch," she said. Adilai laughed, though she seemed nervous. Then again, who _wouldn't_ be nervous in the company of their superior officer, who _was_ technically punishing them by inflicting their presence onto the unfortunate underling. Juice-hunting wasn't as bad as washing up two-hundred sticky, green tankards, though; she knew that from her recent, pre-dawn experience.

"If you hit him you'd get demoted."

"It would be classed as assault and would go to tribunal, actually. If he ever did something bad enough for me to hit him, I'd make sure there were witnesses, witnesses who would ultimately testify in _my_ favour."

"You make everything sound like a tactic."

"Everything _is_ a tactic. Now, let's get out of smuggler's cove here," she said, which was a joke, though she was not entirely sure Adilai understood that that was a joke, "The Alliance requisition budget won't cover the costs of things like juice and coffee and luxuries, and neither will my wage. So we need to get some funding. Have you ever played skrips?" Adilai had not. "It's like poker, but a lot more challenging."

"Gambling? You're going to gamble your own wage to buy coffee for the soldiers?"

"…When you put it like _that_ it sounds risky."

"Isn't it."

"Not when you're me, it's not," she said.

Adilai lowered her voice to a whisper, "Do you cheat?"

"No!" Jenny exclaimed in protest, "I'd never cheat at anything." Lying and stealing and sneaking around was one thing, but cheating was where she drew the line in terms of compromising her own sense of morals. She would not cheat at skrips on Nostraleo to win money. She had used to win all sorts back when she was in the circus and she had first been taught how to play skrips, taught by Jovy, the magician, the alien Olia had been the assistant for. There was a name she rarely thought of now, _Olia_. Along with Jenny's natural ease for everything, being taught a card game by a magician meant she was talented at skrips beyond belief. She had never lost, and she never would.

They left the docking bay to find one of the transit trams that went to every major crevice of Nostraleo. As always, the trams were packed, because they did not come often enough or large enough for everyone to be accommodated comfortably. It was annoying, being rammed into that little, claustrophobic box with so many warm and inconvenienced commuters, but a necessary evil for them to actually get anywhere.

As they navigated Nostraleo, Jenny received salutes from more or less every soldier they passed. Every few seconds another person raised their hand to their head and said in a respectful tone, "Major Young," and nodded, and she smiled and gave a loose salute in response. It wasn't just the soldiers who noticed Jenny, either. Of course, they were the only people who acted this way out of a sense of duty imposed by the Homeworld Alliance itself, but the refugees and Nostraleo denizens they passed by all greeted her in the same kind of grateful way.

"Nice to see you in Nostraleo again, Miss Young," one man said, someone she had one retrieved a stolen family heirloom for.

"It's nice to see you as well, Krax," she responded.

"Major! I heard the campaign on Deftan has been going well?" an Alliance veteran who had been stuck with both of his legs missing on Nostraleo for nearing on ten years; he had never served with Jenny, but her reputation preceded her, and she had put him in touch with a contact of hers who could get him newer prosthetics.

"I'm not sure how well any campaign can be going if the war's still going on, Colonel," she said.

"Well I'm sure you'll bring it to a close soon, before too many of ours die."

" _Any_ deaths should be avoided," she said.

Jokingly, the old Colonel responded that he didn't know how anyone so soft was such a celebrated cog in the metaphorical machine of the greater Alliance, but by then they had passed him in the long hallways. There were people sleeping in the streets here, and she didn't like that. She made a mental note to inquire about what new residential quadrants of Nostraleo were under construction, and what the Alliance were doing about this overflow of persons. Before then, she ought to find things for them to sleep on. She was sure there were surplus military supplies somewhere she could get her hands on.

"Jenny!" an old lady exclaimed, an old lady who was not a human, but rather one of Deftan's own, someone displaced from their home by the campaign against the Nomatee. Deftanites were not too dissimilar to humans; they were humanoid enough, just with pale green skin that shone in the lights of Nostraleo and bright yellow eyes. Along with that, they were generally quite tall. This one old woman was very thin and more than two feet above Jenny, who might be short, but it was still hard to talk to someone who towered above you so much.

"You're shrinking, Heressia," she joked.

"I've got more of your favourites," she said. Heressia was one of the few Deftanites in Nostraleo who was not homeless and owned a business, a bakery, and she was pushing a cart of food through these halls. She donated it to the refugees, and it was one of these brown paper bags she handed to Jenny. In front of Heressia, though, Adilai seemed to cower. Jenny paid little note for the time being.

"Give your baking to the people who need it," Jenny said, beaming.

"I insist," she said, "After you let my family and I stay on your ship to escape the Nomatee and come here." Jenny and Heressia argued for a while longer about how Jenny could not possibly take the treats, the names of which she did not know, but they were blue and a bit like macarons, only with sherbet lining the inside of the soft, sweet 'shell'. Ultimately, Jenny had to take them, and wave Heressia on her way.

"Do you want one?" she held the bag out to Adilai, taking one for herself. A welcome change from the overpriced cashew nuts she had been nibbling on that morning; compared to Heressia's authentic alien home-baking, cashews were like rabbit food. Gingerly, Adilai did take one.

"She was from Deftan?" Half a statement of fact, half a question.

"Mmm," Jenny nodded, her mouth full.

"I didn't know there were so many people from Deftan here…" Adilai stared around. There were a lot, Jenny supposed, but she had grown used to hanging around aliens in recent decades. It was silly to think of anyone non-human as 'her kind,' especially when she was really more human than anything else, but… she did. She was not quite, yet, over her prejudices against humanity formed in the wake of World War Two. She didn't think she would ever abide by the US's decision to drop those bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and to give them such colloquial, almost friendly, names – 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy' – but after all, the people who had dropped those bombs were a vile and gross minority of Earth's population.

"They're refugees," Jenny said.

"Did she call you 'Jenny'?"

"Why wouldn't she?"

"Is that your name, Major Young?" Jenny nodded. Adilai seemed amused.

"What? What's wrong with the name 'Jenny'?"

"It's not very frightening."

"Why should my name be frightening?"

"Your reputation sort of is."

"Oh…" she said. Was it? Were people scared of her? Was 'Jenny' just not a name used by upstanding military personnel? No one had taken issue with her being called Jenny _before_. Maybe she should start using her full name: she rehearsed this now, in her head, in a daydream: " _Hi, I'm Major Generated-Anomaly Young. Call me GAY._ " Wait, she then thought, maybe she shouldn't start going by the nickname 'gay.' Especially when she wasn't even gay… as far as she knew. Truth be told, she had not really thought of it either way. But she still liked 'Jenny' so she would stick with it. She couldn't go changing _both_ of her names on a whim, it was bad enough with just the surname.

"Now," she began quietly, rolling up the paper bag and speaking in a warning tone of voice to Adilai, "These are the slums, this is where the best pay outs are."

"Wouldn't that be illegal?"

"It's a grey area, okay?" Jenny lied. It was illegal. But it was a victimless crime, apart from the people she was going to utterly destroy at skrips.

In a brief amount of time, the entire vibe of Nostraleo had changed. Yes, the docks had been bad, but the commuter tram had been well-kept and fancy. Probably because it was universal. The most important and 'least important' people (which was an outdated concept, Jenny thought all people were equally important. After all, where would they be without Heressia charitably passing around her baked goods to the people who couldn't afford to eat?) all mingled on the trams. Now it grew worse, though. The walls were still white and one shone quite well, but the overhead lights had been busted a while ago. Now, there were just crudely wired lanterns hanging from the walls, at least half of them running on modified batteries that made them last twice as long but shine twice as dim. Graffiti had also begun to creep across the walls, and the people sleeping in the streets became dirtier. Jenny had been homeless before, though, and smiled at these people as well.

She was caught off guard and nearly knocked off her feet by something knocking into her, pushing between she and Adilai and forcing them apart. Adilai was not as agile or prepared as Jenny Young was, Jenny who realised in a split-second what was happening: they'd been duped. A little boy had just run between them, he could only be eight years old, maybe less, and he'd just barged through them, the little rascal. In a swift motion, Jenny grabbed him by the back of his clothes and wrenched him back.

"Give me my credit stick back," she said, holding him. The people dozing in the corners ignored this scene. Everything went ignored in these dark annals of the space city.

"I didn't take your credit stick, lady!" the kid protested. Effortlessly, Jenny lifted the kid all the way off his feet, holding him in front of her. He was very small. Adilai got back to her feet, Jenny holding the boy with one hand, the other still holding Heressia's paper bag of treats.

"You did, I felt you take it," she said, "Give me it back."

"Or what?"

"I'm on very good terms with Major Young of the Homeworld Alliance, have you heard of them?" she said. The boy narrowed his eyes, struggling against her hold. She could hold him up for days if it came down to it. She was used to lifting things much heavier than street rats.

"Maybe."

"Well I'll carry you all the way to Major Young if you don't give me back my credit stick. And my friend's credit stick."

"What? I've still got my…" Adilai searched her jacket, and came up short, then exclaimed, "He took my credit stick!"

"He's just a pickpocket," Jenny said, "And not a very good one, evidently. Honestly, when I was your age I could do a way better lift than that. Give me the stick back and I'll teach you."

"…Fine, lady," he muttered, revealing from his pockets their two missing credit sticks, which Adilai took as Jenny dropped the boy back down onto the floor and then knelt in front of him.

"Lifts, right?" she began, "You can't go bumping into people like that, you're drawing attention to yourself already. Soon as they realise something's gone missing, they'll remember a brat like you knocked them over earlier. It's about, sort of, staying behind them, in their shadow, and being delicate. You'll have to practice. Why are you stealing?"

"My family haven't eaten for three days, miss."

"Well, take these," she said, handing him the paper bag of treats, "The best on Nostraleo. But a word of advice, don't you ever steal from people who can't do without. Nobody in a situation like you, and nobody trying to help. Definitely not any Alliance personnel, they have enough to worry about going off to war without you stealing from them as well."

" _You_ look like you can do without," he said, "You're giving food away."

"I need this money to buy food and drink for the soldiers, that's my job, I'm the major, Major Young," she said, and he stared at her. She just smiled. "You're lucky it was me and not any of the other officers, _they_ wouldn't be so sympathetic. Now go share those things with your family." As soon as she stood back up, he bolted, and disappeared around the corner in a tiny, dirty blur. She watched him go.

"Why would you teach him how to steal?" Adilai asked.

"He's going to steal anyway, he'd better be clever about it," she said, taking her credit stick back from Adilai. "Anyway, there are people who need a lot more than the people who have an abundance of it. Some of them hide out in this gambling den down here, and I'm about to clear them out. C'mon." She continued taking them on their journey down the slum district, past houses built out of old and abandoned office complexes and now the residence of up to half a dozen people per room. And the rooms were not very large at all. It was squalid down there. Not exactly as bad as Tungtrun, though; at least it was warm and sheltered.

"Where _are_ you from? Where did you grow up?"

"Questions," she answered coolly. She wasn't going to spill any of her most intimate details, and in Jenny's mind, _any_ detail about her was an 'intimate' one. People would have to earn being her confidant, and as of yet, nobody had. She didn't let them. She liked it that way. They wended through the sleeping homeless refugees, a myriad of different species Jenny could not be bothered to point out to Adilai because it would feel a little too much like going to the zoo. There they were, _slumming_ , in a way.

"There aren't any Nomatee here," Adilai said.

"The Nomatee are the ones we're fighting _against_."

"But they're not all fighting. I thought some of them would make their way here."

"Maybe some of them have," Jenny shrugged, "Seems odd though. The Alliance are paranoid about spies, and this _is_ an Alliance installation."

"Do you not like the Nomatee?"

"That's…" she began, frowning, "I think they should stop trying to take over this system by force, but that's probably not what all of them want to do. I'm sure there are plenty of Nomatee who are just following orders because they're scared of what will happen if they don't. Maybe even most of them are doing that. I couldn't say. Now, this is where we need to be." Jenny changed the subject. Her thoughts on the current war in Polaris were… complicated. She had to put up a screen that she was loyal to the Alliance through and through. Rather, she was there as… damage control. A little guardian angel watching over the soldiers. The Alliance might tell her what their objectives in any battle were, but Jenny's own private mission was to go through with as few lives lost as possible, on either side. She had not lost a man yet. It was something she could only be partly proud of, because those soldiers had claimed the lives of many of those Nomatee foot-soldiers just following orders, and she didn't value the lives of any species above another. Someone's worth could not be determined simply by measuring their amount of difference to yourself.

They were at a door, a rather non-descript door. The only difference between this door and the other doors in that bleak cavity of Nostraleo was that it was cleaner. Less graffiti. The kids who drew the graffiti knew, and were too scared of, the people who lurked behind these walls. It was the only door as well where the holographic image projected onto its surface in bright orange, indicating it was locked, worked properly. Couldn't have people thinking that it was an easy-to-access place, of course, and it wasn't.

She smiled to herself, remembering how Viola's speakeasies used to work, _O'Hara's_ itself especially: with passwords and special knocks. This place, which wasn't a bar at all but just a high-stakes gambling den, worked with biometrics. Jenny put her hand through the lock hologram, just like she would to open any door, and whoever was inside got told who she was by scanning her DNA: Major J. Young, just like that. But Major J. Young was a repeat client, and it didn't matter that she worked for the Alliance, the door still opened to accommodate her.

"You need to stay quiet in here, alright?" Jenny whispered to Adilai, "I'm ordering you to stay quiet. It's important. You don't want to disobey orders." She didn't like to pull rank (alright, she kind of totally _did_ sometimes like to pull rank, but that was neither here nor there), but she could not risk getting kicked out of this little illicit basement, because she needed the money she won on skrips to do her 'morale boosting' job effectively. She took morale boosting very seriously, and she did most of it in secret. Well, she tried to. It didn't always work. She was sure there was a rumour going around that the officers got paid an obscene amount, but the rumour never came to much fruition because Jenny made sure the soldiers had a good quality of life regardless, and because they respected her.

"Oh, great – hide your wallets, boys, Young's come to clean us out again," a woman said, the woman in charge, someone who was called Stare because she had ten eyes, all of them on stalks protruding out of a purple head roughly the size of a grapefruit. Jenny didn't know the name of Stare's species, because the only way to find out would be asking, and asking Stare personal questions while you were casually trying to steal money from her wasn't a very good ploy. Maybe one day Jenny would figure it out, but until then she grinned under the gaze of those ten sideways, goat-like pupils. The bouncer by the door smiled at Jenny as she came in. There was another Deftanite at the table, two humans, and another alien who was covered in a shiny, black exoskeleton and had a stinging, scorpion-like tail. Possibly they had evolved for some sort of scorpion creature. Two large claws, he was holding the skrips cards with his lower, abdominal legs, which had about three spindly fingers on them each. A newbie.

"Clean you out? I couldn't possibly."

"Who's the girl?" asked the bouncer.

"My new assigned aide," Jenny said, "Don't worry, she's alright. You've got my word."

"Words don't count for much down here," said Stare.

"I forget you're scared of Alliance personnel," Jenny remarked. Stare…. stared. Glared, maybe. It was hard to tell. She could not exactly pull off any facial expressions whatever, and it didn't help that her mouth was a long slit across the top of her small head, in between the five eye-stalks on either side. What an unusual species. She had ten arms, too.

"You'll have to play against _me_ for that, Young."

"If you're up for a challenge," Jenny said, smirking, proud of herself. She could not lose at skrips. They all knew that. But the bouncer had watched her and watched her, they all had, trying to work out of she was cheating. Of course, she wasn't cheating, so they had never found anything out. At any rate, she didn't stop by Nostraleo enough for them to be really suffering at her aptitude for card tricks.

"The girl stands where she can't see anybody else's cards," Stare ordered, again trying to stop Jenny from cheating.

"Sure, maybe I'll teach her a trick or two," Jenny said, sliding into the last empty seat at the large, circular table, winking at Stare, who could not wink. That was why Jenny went out of her way to wink at her so often, and give her winning smile. Jenny's winning smile opened a lot of doors; in fact, it was how she had originally opened _this_ door, into the skrips den.

"You can shuffle the cards then."

"I will," Jenny said, "What's the buy-in?"

"Five-thousand credits," Stare said. Looks of unease passed around the others at the table. One of them she actually knew, one of the humans: Aldo Koltn, she thought his name was. He was a little cosy with Cargill. No doubt she would get found out for doing this, unless she slyly made it clear she was using the money won at skrips to buy more coffee rations. Koltn drank coffee just like everybody else did, and cherished it as well. Jenny was not much of a fan of the stuff, perhaps because she had never in her life actually needed a caffeine boost. Who needed a caffeine boost when you naturally stayed awake for an entire week at a time?

"Five-thousand is a lot to put against Young," the scorpion said.

"Then you won't be playing, will you, if you can't cough up," Stare told him sharply, "You've got the money. You won the last game. Koltn's just gone all-in, and he's broke."

"I can wipe the floor with her, easy," Koltn boasted. Jenny just smiled. In the end, the Deftanite and the other human cut their losses and got out of there with the winnings they'd just had. Jenny had more than sixty years of experience operating in shady areas of business. In a way, she was having more fun gambling in a sub-basement than she was out in the _Nausicaa_ heading back into a warzone. Maybe if it had windows to look out of, but she wasn't authorised to be on the bridge unless it was an emergency and she got ordered to be there by a superior, _or_ she was the highest authority present. Neither of those had happened yet, so she didn't get to see the stars half as much as she _thought_ she would by going off and travelling with the army. In that way, the Homeworld Alliance was an unfortunate disappointment.

Stare dealt out the cards, Koltn grinning to himself and shaking his head as soon as he saw what he'd got, like he couldn't believe how phenomenally lucky he was to have achieved his selection. Was he bluffing, she wondered? Quite possibly. Her hand was okay. She had a four, a six and an eight, all of them a different one from the game's seven suits, and two more fours and a nine. It was a decent hand. The scorpion put down a power nine. It took Jenny all of five minutes to wrangle herself a quarter-flush by getting four cards in order with half of them from the same suit, while Koltn kept putting down a string of horizontal nines in a vain attempt to get a seven-string, when you put down the same number in every suit in a line. Of course, it was very hard to do this, because someone could easily use one of those nines to change the aim, much like dominos. The scorpion did this when there were three nines in a row, putting down a star ten above Koltn's star nine and earning himself another go because he'd been the one to place the original power nine. With his other go he put down a star twelve, and suddenly he was winning.

Jenny, after getting her quarter-flush, had been folding on every turn. Now she had ten cards in her hand, and as luck would have it, one of them was a star thirteen. She took a risk and put it down in the new objective column the scorpion had created, which disheartened Koltn, because his four remaining cards clearly were not in the same suit, and so could not be placed owing to the complex rules of skrips. The complex rules which Adilai was clearly _not_ following. It just looked like dominos with cards, a little, until Stare – who had been building up a large hand and now had eleven cards – made a move to rid herself of eight of them and finish the full-flush that Jenny and the scorpion had started. She got all thirteen cards of the power suit down in a vertical line, which gave her the authority to begin a new web of cards on a different part of the table.

"You're off your game, Young," Stare said.

"Maybe you're just playing especially well today," Jenny remarked. Jenny wasn't off her game. She would win. It was not a game of luck, it was a game of tactics, and she was marvellously good at tactics.

"I can't wait to scrub the floor with you," Koltn said to her, "Tell everyone on the _Nausicaa_ how I robbed the Major of all her money."

"I'm gonna use this money to buy more coffee rations, you know," Jenny said, "The Alliance don't provide your coffee, I do." Koltn was taken aback, taken aback so much that he put down a terrible card and practically drew the game to halt for a moment.

"Using the money you win in a gambling den to provide for the soldiers under your charge? I almost want you to win," said the scorpion in his scratchy voice that reverberated unusually in his mandibles. "But I won't be able to pay my rent if you do."

"Shouldn't have bought-in then, should you?" Stare commented.

"You're the one who _told_ me to buy in," the scorpion argued.

"Never trust someone whose expressions you can't read," Jenny told the scorpion knowingly, "That one's got a better poker face than any of us."

"You can't see _my_ face," the scorpion argued.

"It's all in your tone of voice," Jenny said. The scorpion had an amiable and kind tone of voice, which was why she did not think he was a very seasoned skrips player. And here she was, about to rob him of everything. He also had nervous body language; she'd never even encountered this species before and she could tell that much.

"You're going to spend all this money on coffee?" Koltn persisted.

"Suddenly you seem sure that I'm going to win."

"I could just buy my own coffee with this money."

"And the other soldiers would love you for that, wouldn't they, Corporal?" Jenny said smoothly. Koltn might know his way around a deck of cards adequately, but he was not so liked among the soldiers. He hung around a lot with Lieutenant Cargill, a real bootlicker. Jenny didn't have any bootlickers, because she didn't need them sticking onto her like barnacles. She was good enough to all the soldiers anyway, without them begging her for special favours. Not that she would really give anyone special favours if they asked.

"How's the campaign going against the Nomatee going then, Major?" Stare interrupted when Koltn didn't have an answer.

"I'm not sure it _is_ going," Jenny sighed, "The whole Ground Force has been against a wall for weeks."

"Lieutenant Cargill has been vying for an air strike but _someone_ keeps blocking his suggestions," Koltn remarked.

"Do you know how many civilians you would kill with an air strike?" Adilai spoke for the first time.

Stare turned all ten of her eyes on Jenny after placing down her next card and asked coldly, "I thought you said the girl wasn't going to speak?"

"She's fine," Jenny said, "She's not disrupting the game."

"They're all Nomatee, they're all the same," Koltn commented.

Adilai was about to say something else, but Jenny cut her off and addressed Koltn, "I think that's called 'racism.' I should give you a write up."

"You can't, I'll tell everyone you've been gambling."

"I'd win any hearing or tribunal they put me through for this," Jenny said, putting two cards down to try and get herself another flush, " _You'd_ still have to do two-hundred push-ups." Koltn was no longer paying much attention.

"They're invading places and killing innocent people."

"The Alliance would be killing innocent people if they carried out an air strike," she said, "Or destroying their homes. And it wouldn't be Nomatee, it would be Deftanites that would die. Don't you ever think about things from the other side, Koltn?"

"I'm a soldier, they're the enemy."

"It's a matter of circumstance," Jenny said, "Like humans haven't ever invaded somewhere they didn't have any right to."

"Not for centuries." It hadn't been centuries, because Jenny knew her history far better than Koltn did, but she couldn't be bothered arguing with him. He'd really start to annoy her soon, and then she might lose her cool and end up knocking out one of his teeth. Which would only be an improvement to the ingrate.

"So, is there any word on how long the war is going to last?" the scorpion asked now, genuinely interested, his question directed at the Major rather than the Corporal. She was much more agreeable. They were all distracted and had not noticed that Jenny had turned the skrips game to her favour, and she was steadily winning.

"No. It's a quagmire, really," Jenny said, "I wonder if it's worth all this; Polaris isn't going to recover for generations."

"The Nomatee started it," Koltn said. Jenny said nothing more to him, but that riled him up. "You know, it must be so easy for you to speak like that, Young. To say that it's all 'circumstance' and act like I'm doing something wrong for being a foot-soldier. Just because _you_ don't ever actually leave the forward camp or the _Nausicaa_ , you just give orders. I'm the one risking my life."

"Me sitting back and giving orders is exactly the reason you still have your life," she snapped, "I've never lost a man."

"Sacrifices are necessary in any war."

"Do you want to die or not, Corporal? You can always quit or runaway."

"Is that what you do when things get hard?"

"I care about all life, not just humans," Jenny evaded his comment about quitting and runaway. It was hard to get away from the fact that she sort of _did_ quit and runaway a lot, always fleeing and hiding from _something_ , or waiting for an opportunity to leave. Even then, she was scanning for escape routes, trying to work out the best way out of Polaris, just in case it came down to it.

"What side are you on? What are you fighting for?"

"I think that's a…" the scorpion interrupted, staring at the skrips table in front of them, "Full house."

"What?" Koltn asked, looking down. She did have a full house, a long streak of all thirteen of the galactus suit, her favourite suit if she had to pick one, completely unimpaired by anybody else's cards. Only Stare had really noticed, and Stare had not done anything. Possibly because she wanted to see Jenny wipe the grin off Koltn's face. "She cheated," he declared.

"Young doesn't cheat," the bouncer, who had otherwise remained silent since letting her into the den, "Believe me, Stare's been trying to work out how she does it for months, but there's nothing out of the ordinary."

"There's something about you," Koltn began angrily, "I can't place it. I'm gonna find out what it is, though, what's your secret."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, put your money into the pot," Stare ordered, the bouncer drawing a gun in case Koltn tried something. He was the sort of weasel who _might_ try something, even though he was so obviously out of his depth down there. The scorpion gave up his money easily, if sadly, accepting that Jenny was the victor. She took the one credit stick now loaded with the funds of all the losers, and saw the very large figure of nearly thirty-thousand credits. She was going to have to do something good with this much money; the buy-in was usually a lot less than five-thousand. "Going to stay for another round? Give us a chance to win it back?"

"Oh, I don't think Corporal Koltn could afford that," Jenny said, loading the credits onto her own credit stick and then getting out of her chair, which she put neatly back under the table. "A pleasure doing business with you, Stare, as always." She mimed tipping a hat and did a little curtsey, even going so far as to wink again. It was hard to tell if Stare found that funny, but she didn't tell Jenny to stop. For a moment, she met the scorpion's tiny black eyes, and completely ignored Koltn. Then she turned back to Adilai. "C'mon, Private."

"There's something funny about her, too," said Koltn, "That stuff she was drinking last night barely even had alcohol in it." Jenny ignored him still, but thought he may have a point. There were a lot of odd things about Adilai, but everyone had their quirks. She would keep an eye out, there was nothing else she could do. Couldn't interrogate her on a whim, not when Jenny doubted she had any malign intentions. Adilai followed her out of the gambling den, the bouncer holding the door open, and they emerged back into the graffiti'd little hovel with pee stains sticky and dripping up the walls. It smelt a bit, too; inside it had smelt of sweat, and outside it was urine. Unpleasant.

"I hate Koltn," Adilai declared instantly, "How can you judge an entire species like that?"

Jenny laughed, then held up her hand with her thumb and forefinger half a centimetre apart, "I was _this close_ to decking him. But I don't want to be put under military arrest." She lowered her voice to a whisper and added, "I'll put fish paste in his pillowcase."

"Will you?"

"Uh… sure. No one ever eats the fish paste rations anyway, they're going to waste otherwise. Besides, it's bad of me to play on this, but nobody likes Corporal Koltn; a prank like that would probably make everybody _else_ feel better. A sense of comradery. That's what he deserves for being racist," Jenny said, not moving to go anywhere. She was waiting. Adilai was confused by their lack of movement.

"Don't we have somewhere else to go now you got some money?"

"Maybe," Jenny said, "Wait a moment more, though."

"For what?"

"You'll see," she said, stepping out of the way of the door. She would lean on the wall, if it wasn't so grossly stained with defecations. So she crossed her arms to wait, keeping a tight grip on her incredibly valuable credit stick in case that pickpocket came back around and decided to be more sly than the last time.

What they were waiting for eventually happened; the door of the gambling den opened, and out stepped the scorpion Jenny had just robbed. She smiled at him, very tall and walking on the lower two of his six legs, clawed arms hanging by his side along with his other two arms.

"Hi," she said.

"Why were you waiting?"

"Don't play coy, you were following," she said, then cleared her throat, "I think I owe you some money."

"You just won it…"

"So what? It's way more than I need," she said, "You said you need to pay your rent. Koltn doesn't need to pay for anything, he'll have a bed and food no matter what he does with his disposable income. How does eight sound?"

"Eight credits?"

"Eight-thousand."

" _What_?"

"In exchange, you can tell me your name and species, because I've never met a humanoid scorpion before," she said. When the scorpion was stood up, he reached just over seven feet tall, and had a large stinger rearing up behind him. His head was nearly human, though. Well, it was sort of elongated and pointed at the back, but it was not the stubby little thing of a little Earth scorpion, though the eyes were very similar. He needed his rent so badly, it seemed, that he accepted her offer without arguing.

"I'm a Glanusku," he said while Jenny gave him the eight-thousand credits, "From Leytune, it's got a lot of intelligent species, very close to the middle of Polaris. The Nomatee haven't really got there yet, just a little."

"And your name?"

"It's, uh, Zyorb." She had heard that name before on the bottom of a lot of true crime newspaper reports.

"Oh, cool! I'm Major Jenny. This is Private Adilai."

The scorpion laughed, "Yeah…"

"We were about to go and get something to eat," said Jenny, "Do they have the sort of food you eat on Nostraleo?"

"It's mainly insects. I don't know. I haven't been here for long, just got into port today."

"Really? On what ship?"

"That's not important."

"Well. Coming?" she asked, making to walk off.

"Both of you?" he looked at Adilai, looked at her for a while. She grew very uneasy, in fact had been even more ill-at-ease since Zyorb had come out of the gambling den and met them to begin with. "No, no. I should… I was expecting a big pay out for something, but it doesn't matter anymore because you gave me the eight-thousand credits. I should leave, leave Nostraleo."

"Really?" Jenny asked.

"Good luck to you, though, both of you," Zyorb said, going off the opposite way, barely even a goodbye. Why had he come out to meet them, then? She had a myriad of suspicions she had just, covertly, been investigating, by luring him outside with smiles to begin with. He was very desperate to leave, though, dropping down onto all six of his legs and scuttling away from them in the opposite direction.

"I don't trust him," Adilai said finally. Jenny didn't say anything, but walked off the same way they had come, the other direction to Zyorb.

"Why?" Jenny asked, walking briskly.

"Well, he… said 'good luck.' That's a weird thing to say. Then running away."

"Maybe he's shy," Jenny said. She agreed with Adilai, though. She just didn't want to alarm her. "Forget about it, you can't expect to meet people who _aren't_ a bit shady down in a place like that. We'll go all the way back up to the bazaar and get something to eat, though, it'll be alright up there." That was what she promised, but she was not entirely sure if she believed herself. Adilai believed her, but Jenny kept an eye open, if only to watch for pickpockets.

But she had not just wanted to befriend Zyorb the scorpion, he had been observing Adilai unusually throughout the entirety of the skrips game. It was not Jenny his attentions had been focused on. And she was very careful around aliens she had never seen before who lurked in space-age poker dens and kept a close watch on naïve human girls who were not even twenty. 'Good luck', 'big pay out,' she thought these phrases were all clues, but she set them aside for a while as they went about finding something to eat because by god she was starving. She just wanted something gluttonous and incredibly unhealthy to quench the hunger that living on military rations for two months had spawned.

She got what she wanted, too, in the form of a triple cheeseburger, which she thought was probably the greatest invention in all of human history, because it was two huge beef patties with a third patty of pure cheese in between, and it was glorious (well, she doubted that it was real beef, or real cheese, or real anything; just a variety of identical but differently-textured synthetic substances, with equally synthetic dyes, fragrances and flavours bleeding through.) She got two of them, and she would eat all of both of them in a matter of minutes and have absolutely no regrets. Sometimes when she came back to Nostraleo she would go out of her way to find something new and alien to eat, but in her unease about Zyorb she had a desperation for something cheap, filling which she knew she would like, so she went for the most heinous old-Earth junk she could sniff out.

"You're going to eat both of those?"

"Yes," Jenny said firmly, grinning at the joys of the garbage she was shovelling into herself and her alien metabolism. She had an entire plate of fries, too. It had been the best thing to happen to her since the last time she had slept, and that had been four or five days ago. Adilai wasn't particularly interested in Earth food, though, and vanished for a moment to come back with what looked like a paper bag full of shallow-fried insects Jenny didn't recognise. "What's that?" she asked, mouth full.

"Just… something from Deftan."

"Trying something new?"

"This? No, my parents, they…"

"Your parents from Mars?"

"Well, erm, they're not… we…" Adilai faltered. Jenny was growing as suspicious of Adilai and her double statements as she was of Zyorb running away from them. "I don't understand some of what you said to Koltn."

"Oh, really?"

"About trying to not get any soldiers killed. I think he's right. I think you're not as loyal to the war as you seem," she said. She didn't say it in a necessarily accusatory way, and Jenny actually thought it was a bit of a breath of fresh air that somebody was questioning her for once. She didn't get questioned often.

"It's not a war like I've seen wars before," she said, "It's isolated, and they fight it with skirmishes. It's ridiculous to have a ground war against the Nomatee, the numbers are equal and the Alliance can't justify bolstering themselves anymore when people in Sol don't really care about what happens in Polaris. Personally, I think it's ridiculous, that's why I generally try to shift the focus onto rescue missions rather than offensives, like Cargill wants. One big offensive with a bunch of airstrikes – that's what he's vying for. Can you think of anything more damaging? Send in the Ground Force while a unit from the Star Fleet fly across and burn everything for a hundred miles in any direction? They'd kill half their own men and only half the Nomatee in the process. Not to mention all the Deftanite civilians."

"Then why are you here, Major? Fighting this war? If you don't agree with it?"

"I didn't say I disagree with it, I'd disagree with it if I wasn't playing an active role in mitigating its damages. There have been very few losses on either side and lots of rescues. Sure, the people that get rescued end up as refugees here, but I try to help with that, as well. I'll show you later. Anyway, the Nomatee are ruled by a monarchy, if they would just take out the figureheads then everyone else would fall into place and stop trying to conquer Polaris," Jenny explained her own thoughts in the matter of the Polaris Wars. It really was just another painfully familiar story of royal conquest. "The generals aren't thinking about it in a wide enough context, haven't even really considered the Nomatee leadership. There's an issue with monarchies in military spats, and that's that they think they're fighting a hydra instead of two or three lunatics. The campaign would collapse if they were removed."

"'Removed' is a very detached way to say 'kill.'"

"Maybe because I didn't mean kill," Jenny shrugged, "But the way this is going, it'll end in a ridiculous peace treaty in ten years that allows the Nomatee to have full sovereignty over whatever territories they've claimed already if they keep out of the way out of the Alliance, and then the Alliance would never intervene in whatever civil rights violations going on right under their noses there'll be. Throw soldiers at a problem until brute force fails and then they'll run away because they don't know the meaning of 'diplomacy.' The best you could hope for after that would be a guerrilla revolt. If it came to that stage, I wouldn't be a part of the Alliance anymore."

"What do _you_ think of the Nomatee monarchy?"

"I think that they got to Deftan and massacred most of the senate there to clear them out of the courts, and then they've started living there because Deftan has some rather gorgeous scenery and bright-purple rainforests, exactly the sort of view anyone would want to have sitting on top of a mountain pretending the universe revolves around them," Jenny said. Then she laughed. "I also think that I know every soldier on board the _Nausicaa_ , and a great deal of others aside, and that before yesterday I'd never seen you before or heard your name. And that about a week ago the princess of the Nomatee monarchy went missing, which led to a huge assault on the Alliance stronghold on Deftan, and that the Nomatee have some advanced cloaking technology.

"Then I think – I'm almost positive – that you're lying about being from Mars, and if you were telling the truth about just coming to Nostraleo recently you'd have no idea _what_ those weird insects you're eating are, nor would you be able to eat them because there was a sign on the stall with a symbol warning the Alliance use to get around language barriers that warns that those insects are poisonous and fatal to humans. But you're eating them fine, and every soldier who's ever received basic training knows what that symbol means. So you're not a human, you're cloaking, you showed up out of nowhere, stowed away on an Alliance ship, got drunk on those alcopops that don't even contain enough alcohol to cause anything more than a placebo buzz in a human, plus you seem very sympathetic to the Nomatee.

"And you're terrified of Zyorb, you keep looking over your shoulder for him, but I think I know who Zyorb is, too, because that's not his real name, it's a moniker. He's a bounty hunter. He's been picking off Alliance generals for months, but I couldn't put him under military arrest because the only evidence I've got is the name he was using. And he said he was expecting a 'big pay out' but then he changed his mind. There's all that, that's what I think about the Nomatee monarchy."

"You-! You haven't got any proof!"

"Show me your Alliance ID," Jenny ordered. Adilai did not do anything. She was frozen. She had not eaten anymore of her insects, and had dropped one on the floor as soon as Jenny had caught her dead to rights. "Plus, I can smell it on you, that you're not a human."

"Humans don't have a sense of smell strong enough to tell species apart," Adilai remarked. She was basically admitting it now.

"Who says I'm a human?" Jenny said. Then she took another bite of her burger. Adilai stared at her. "You don't have to be a human to join the Alliance, just be dedicated to the 'protection of freedom', or something."

"You're using a cloaking device as well, then? It's a wonder you've been able to hide."

"I'm not hiding, actually, and I'm not cloaking, I just look painfully human," Jenny explained, "My superiors know exactly what and who I am, part of the reason I got promoted so quickly. I'm a Time Lord, I'm from the future." They had, for most of this conversation now, been talking very quietly, in whispers hissed back and forth over the table. Adilai was panicking, but Jenny was still calm and still engrossed in her burgers.

"A Time Lord is the kind of authority my parents would need to stop their ridiculous conquest of Polaris," Adilai hissed, fully admitting now that _she_ was the lost Nomatee princess. Up until working it out, Jenny had just thought that the princess – who'd been really the only subject of discussion for the last six days on the _Nausicaa_ and in the Alliance's official channels – had ended up mulch in the unforgiving wilderness of Deftan. Even Jenny had nearly ended up mulch after an intense run-in with the local wildlife when she had first arrived on the planet earlier that year.

"Your parents are butchers, there's not going to be any legitimate negotiations with them. I've known you for barely a day and I can see you've got barely anything in common with them, you don't want the war to carry on. _You're_ the one who can stop it," Jenny said, "But you've run off."

"I've been _trying_ to stop it, don't you think I have?" Adilai said, "Most of the Nomatee have, all their advisors. Eventually the Alliance will destroy them if they put any actual effort into reclaiming Polaris for its own species. They're greedy. I came to plead with the Alliance, to get back to wherever their base is, their real base, not this place, in Sol. Tell them that one almighty push would make my parents change their ways."

"They wouldn't listen to you," Jenny said, "They'd use you as a bargaining chip, try to get peace in exchange for you going back to them."

"Wouldn't work. I've done everything I can shy of poisoning them both, and I couldn't do that," Adilai said firmly. Jenny didn't expect her to want to kill her parents. "Could _you_ do it, Major? Kill your own parents?" Jenny nearly laughed. Kill her parents? Her parent? Kill the Doctor? Millions of people had tried to kill the Doctor and it never seemed to go to well for them. That was pure logistics, though.

"It would be tricky since I don't know where the Doctor is."

"The Doctor!?" Adilai exclaimed, " _The_ Doctor!?"

"My father."

"Can't you get him to come and sort this out!?"

"You think if I knew where the Doctor was I'd be here? I wouldn't be. I've been looking for him for sixty years and I haven't found him yet – unless _you_ have some way to contact him?" Jenny questioned. She spoke cynically, disguising the microscopic shred of hope that maybe the Nomatee royals _did_ have some secret way to contact the most elusive creature in all of the universe. Adilai said nothing, though, so Jenny assumed not.

"Now it makes sense. You're the Doctor's daughter."

"What 'makes sense'?"

"Everything about you."

"Everything about me how?"

"Helping people, being enigmatic, calculating."

"I'm not calculating."

"Every move you ever make is calculated," Adilai said. Unusual to experience her speaking freely – all of a sudden, Adilai was not a timid and frightened F.N.G., and Jenny was not a fearful commanding officer. They had become equals, the Doctor's daughter and the Nomatee princess. Jenny had finished her food; she had continued eating throughout this 'conversation.' "What are you going to do, then? Turn me over? You'd lose your authority with the soldiers if they knew you were an alien." That was true, all of Jenny's respect hinged on them thinking she was one of them, she was on their side, she was merely an exceptional human, an archetype to be strived towards. An inspiration.

But she was not.

She was genetically engineered to near-perfection; an unattainable mirage.

"It's _your_ choice. You can't hide, though," Jenny said.

"Hide like you?"

"You have responsibilities at home," Jenny told her, "I haven't got a home. But you're not technically a soldier, if you're a stowaway, so I don't actually have any right to boss you around." Adilai was her own person, Jenny couldn't assume that _she_ knew best in a matter of alien politics. She didn't really know anything _about_ the Nomatee or the way they worked. "You want to get to Sol, then? It'll take weeks. Weeks more to talk to the leaders. Months, total, to get any kind of real firepower out here."

"Not with your help."

" _My_ help? To what? Arrange a massacre?" Jenny said.

"You'd only send me to Sol because you don't think they'd listen," Adilai said, "You're in charge of those soldiers, they signed up to give their lives for a cause-"

"They've signed their names on a piece of paper, that doesn't make them cannon fodder," Jenny hissed, furious, "They don't know _what_ they're in for. I can't let people die. I can't with good conscience let lives be extinguished like that."

"So dragging out the war with minimal causalities on either side will be better? Meanwhile, my parents are still making moves on all sorts of other planets in Polaris, because _you're_ twiddling your thumbs," Adilai argued.

"There's still things I have to get today," Jenny changed the subject completely, shutting Adilai's persistency down. "Are you going to come? While I try to improve the lives of the soldiers you think have 'signed up to die'? An extra pair of hands would help." Adilai did agree to come, despite everything, despite their new standing with one another. Jenny couldn't carry on talking to her about all that, though. She had to think about it.

* * *

The coffee and juice was easy enough. She also desired a decent amount of synthetic honey that could be slipped into the gruel the soldiers ate for breakfast every morning to give it an improvement. Along with that, she got enough chocolate to triple the individual chocolate ration, a new selection of holovids for recreation, and a bottle of genuine, prime smuggled whiskey to give to Colonel Tabis to keep him in a good mood. She also bought herself more cashew nuts, because she had become fond of them, and some cuts of meat to stash away and roast for her secret, midnight meals. They were lucky not to have been chased by any other bounty hunters, since Jenny was sure there must be more than just Zyorb after the Nomatee princess.

Adilai had until then to decide whether she was going to come back to Deftan and her parents on the _Nausicaa_ , or if she was going to try and hitchhike all the way back to Sol and try and get a legitimate hearing with the Alliance generals out there, who couldn't really give a damn about what was going on in Polaris. Nostraleo was a comparably small installation, and one most like deemed 'expendable' by the higher-ups Jenny didn't like. She didn't even _really_ like Colonel Tabis that much. Not a fan of authority figures telling her what to do; she preferred to work on her own terms. So did Adilai, apparently. Which didn't really bode well for Jenny's ability to persuade her to go back home. But, she thought Adilai was telling the truth, about trying futilely to stop her parents in their conquest, and would only have run away disguised as the very enemy trying to eradicate her out of sheer desperation and hopelessness. So what good would sending her back to Deftan really do?

But at the same time, Jenny did not want to actively participate in Adilai's scheme to convince the generals to launch a devastating assault on the Nomatee base. It would be a massacre, she was sure of it. And so, she did not know what to do. Gone were the days when somebody else would just tell her what was right and what was wrong, and since 1945 she hadn't trusted those people anyway, she liked to make her own judgments. But Jenny's judgements were failing her now.

She had been practically chewing her tongue trying to decide what action to take, Adilai elsewhere on the _Nausicaa_. She wouldn't run off, not when she was still angling to get Jenny's help. Jenny didn't realise she had lost track of time, though, and completely missed an engagement she had been due at a few hours earlier, at four o'clock in the afternoon. Not that it was important; Austin Cargill's promotion from Lieutenant to Major. She didn't even need to be there, Tabis had just asked her to come to try and show some 'solidarity among the leadership.' There was very little solidarity among the leadership, though. They were a detached and disingenuous bunch.

The door to her quarters was knocked on, and the visitor invited themselves in before she had a chance to speak, snapping her out of her extensive thought processes as she idly sat with her feet up on her desk eating her nuts. She'd been dipping them in a spare pot of honey just to add some variety, but wasn't sure about the combination.

"You didn't come to my promotion," said that smarmy, Irish drawl. Cargill. She rolled her eyes and moved her feet as he came in, and then she immediately started when she saw he wasn't alone; he was dragging Adilai sharply by her elbow. She looked scared. Jenny didn't have a gun within arm's reach, but Cargill had one in his free hand.

"Leave her alone!"

"You can't order me around anymore though, can you, _Major_?" She clenched her jaw.

"So you're going to try and kill your own subordinate!?" she demanded. What was he playing at!? Threatening Adilai with a gun! A blaster, too, fully-charged and ready to fire. And those things had notoriously twitchy triggers. She didn't expect this from him, she thought he was a pathetic little weasel, what was going on?

"Oh, but she's not my subordinate, is she? _Princess_ Adilai?" he jeered.

"Jenny…" Adilai said pleadingly.

"I overheard your conversation earlier, while yous were having lunch," he said, "Something about you not wanting to exercise your authority to convince the generals to launch an assault on the Nomatee base, because you're their favoured Major. Oh, and all that hooey about you being the 'Doctor's daughter', but I knew all that already. Now, I just thought I'd come and inform you not to worry about all that, because _I'll_ speak to the generals and get this entire little war sorted out, thanks to princess here's tip-off."

"That's nice. Let her go."

"Ah, whatever," he shrugged, lowering his gun and pushing Adilai towards Jenny. She came and stood behind her. "They're soldiers, Young. They fight and die. It's what they do."

"They won't listen to you," she said, "They don't even care about what's going on here."

"Maybe you're right. I don't really care, but I'm getting sick of it out here, I'd rather be somewhere more colourful," he said, "Still, I'll try my luck. Better to iron out the creases now rather than later." Jenny glared at him. "I just thought I'd let you know I know your secret, and you wouldn't want the soldiers to know, would you? They might not be so keen to side with you against me if they knew that, and if they knew about how your cowardice is meaning they're stuck out here for even longer."

"What do you want, then?"

"Nothing. Just for you to stay out of my business."

"Fine, Austin. I'll 'stay out of your business.' But you leave her alone, she has to go to Sol herself," Jenny said, finally making up her mind. Better Adilai spoke to the generals than Cargill; it had become a race against time, but not one _she_ wanted anything to do with. Putting Adilai on a spaceship heading out of Polaris was as much intervention as she would commit herself to, and even then it wouldn't prevent her from feeling guilty.

He left. It had been a brief but almost deadly meeting. Jenny waited a few seconds after the door was closed behind Cargill to say anything, but even then it was Adilai who spoke first.

"Will they listen to him?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if they'd listen to _me_."

"Are you really going to help me get to Sol?"

"I have half a mind to come to Sol with you… but I can't abandon these soldiers. I can't run away from them," Jenny sighed. Annoying, because she liked running away from things. She supposed it was a habit inherited from her father and now hard-wired into her flight or fight response. When she fled, she _really_ fled. To a whole other millennium. "This stupid war… as soon as it's over, I'm leaving. Get your things, I have enough credits left to buy you a place on one of the smuggling ships. Come on."


	5. Kitzler

**Kitzler**

 _East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, USSR, New Year's Eve, 1963_

"Shh, shh. I'm Jenny. I'm here to help, alright? Did you see it? Where did it go?" she whispered to a boy of no more than five, kneeling on the floor in the leaking, moon-dappled dormitory of _Das Glückliche Kinder-Waisenhaus_ in front of him. It was icy cold and black mould crept out of the corners and cracked patches of plaster. The other boys in that rotten hall were asleep, all aside from one who had been cowering by the side of the only empty bed. He began to cry. "Don't do that," she cooed, wiping the tear with her gloved thumb, "What's your name?"

"Otto."

"Did you see it, Otto? Did it scare you? I can stop it, if you just tell me where it is," she pleaded.

"It's scary."

"I know, but it won't have to scare anyone else if you help me," she said. Eventually, Otto nodded and gathered himself enough to speak to her.

"I think it went to the laundry room."

"The laundry room? Alright," she said, "You get back into bed, Freddy's going to stay here and look after you." Jenny glanced at the enormous dog next to her, who was panting quite happily, and sat down obediently when Jenny requested he stay and guard the dorm. She got back to her feet, the weight of Emmett on her back, and scratched behind the dog's ear. "Stay on lookout, alright?" Freddy barked. "Good dog. I'll be back soon." She stole out of the room, leaving Freddy and Otto behind.

Emmett helped her feel more secure, but he wouldn't do her any good in this situation. He wasn't even loaded, just in case she got stopped by a military patrol yet again. That was always happening. She had something that would do the job just fine, though, a few tools of the trade she had gone around scrounging a few years ago after abandoning the Homeworld Alliance in its tracks. Some ideas she took from her father, the tissue donor. He was little else. She snuck through the orphanage she had tracked It to, and was feeling confident in her plan, now she finally had it cornered. It was no wonder the evil Thing came to a place full of as much sorrow as this run-down children's home, which was practically a derelict squat it got so little money.

She was on the second floor of the building; the staff members had all snuck off to watch the fireworks somewhere else; Jenny did not think very highly of them for abandoning the children like that, but she was in no position to do anything about East Berlin's welfare infrastructure. Berlin had enough problems without her kicking up a fuss about that. It was best she continued with subtle acts of charity she had been doing for most of her life; working from the bottom-up, a grassroots movement of helping everybody.

She heard a noise in the dark building like something being knocked over and turned her attention towards it, realising at the last moment that the clatter had come from within the very same laundry room Otto had pointed out for her to investigate. Carefully, she pushed the door open, into a room full of clothes and clothes and linen, hanging from wires and pegs and drying racks. She saw a dirty bucket rolling across the floor; the source of the noise, surely. What could have knocked it over, though? Not the Thing she was hunting. That Thing didn't really exist in the same plane as the rest of the world, the rest of the universe, it could not interact like that.

Out of the pocket of her heavy winter coat, sent special order by airmail all the way from Louisiana, she pulled a small, metal object. In layman's terms, it was a flashbang, but flashbangs hadn't been invented in 1963, and at any rate Jenny didn't have any contacts willing to give out grenades to her. Her line of work called for discretion, not explosives. So she'd had to build one herself, specifically for this purpose: maximum light, minimum explosive damage, and remotely detonated. She rolled it along the floor of the laundry room, into the centre, and was sure that by her just being there the Thing would be lured out eventually. All she had to do was think of something sad, woeful, depressing – and she had a lot of sad, woeful and depressing thoughts in her repertoire of recollections. Or she could just take the easy route and imagine a dead kitten, or something.

Waiting, Jenny quickly emptied a linen closet of all its towels and dumped them onto the floor, then hid herself inside and drew the door almost closed. Its whole front was wooden blinds, though, so she wasn't entirely hidden at all. She would just have to be careful to hide her eyes. She probably should have brought some protective goggles…

In front of the window at the opposite end of the room, the moon became obstructed and the room dimmed to almost pitch darkness. There was still some light trickling in from the hallway. That was, she was sure, the Thing she was after, that had been haunting the children in the orphanage and half the population of that district for the last week. A local newspaper had even started to name it ' _Der Geist des Ostens_.' Jenny thought the real 'Ghost of the East' was the suffocating Soviet/American presence on either side, with Berlin caught in a chokehold in the middle. Each to their own though, she supposed.

And then she saw movement. But not _It_ moving, something else. Some _one_ else, in fact. She pressed her face up to the cabinet door and saw that there was a girl in the room, not a resident of the orphanage, but a grown woman. Not one of the staff Jenny knew, either, as she had come to case the place earlier in the day once she figured out where the Thing was hiding. Plus, no care worker would be creeping around a laundry room in the dark on tiptoes in the middle of the night on New Year's Eve. But the Thing was coming, so Jenny acted in a split-second, pushing open the door and grabbing the girl's arm, pulling her into the very cramped linen cupboard with her.

When she shrieked, Jenny clamped a hand tightly over her mouth, barely able to see her.

"Shh," she breathed, leaning closer, "There's something hiding in here. Don't make a sound." Jenny moved her hand away. From the girl's earlier body language, Jenny was sure neither of them were actually supposed to be there.

"It's you," she whispered back; the warmth of her breath was a relief in the cold winter air, " _You're_ hiding." Jenny put a finger to the girl's lips and then looked through the slits in the wooden cupboard again. It was coming, she was sure. She started envisioning that dead kitten, but it wasn't quite sad enough so she switched to a puppy. Then she saw it, or rather, she saw nothing. It was the black shape of negative space in her periphery that alerted Jenny to it being there, hovering right over her tactically-positioned grenade. She moved her hand and fumbled in her pockets again, sensing the girl watching her, and pulled out her sonic screwdriver.

Yep, she had run off from the Alliance and gone to find herself a sonic gadget of her own, some vain way to try and figure a new way to help people. It had paid off, though. She did love that little thing, with its bright pink light and silver body. She pointed it out of the cupboard at the grenade and let it buzz.

"Cover your eyes _now_ ," she ordered the girl, who did, at the exact moment the grenade exploded. It was blinding, and she thought she ought to be in a bunker some ten miles away watching with black goggles like the men on the television carrying out their nuke tests every other day. There was always footage of some new bomb test. Well, they were probably rather old bomb tests. Nothing but propaganda, scare tactics between the Superpowers. Nothing to do with the Germans.

The Thing became illuminated, the girl peeking between her fingers to see its dark shape burn and explode into disintegrating dust. In a matter of seconds, it had been vaporised. They were momentarily drenched again in complete darkness. She'd finally killed it, the stupid thing. And it had forced her to think of dead puppies to manage it – what a cruel creature. She sighed. At least it was over.

" _Scheiße_ , what was _that_?" the girl asked.

"A Shade," Jenny answered, "Like a living shadow. Sort of makes people depress themselves to death, latches onto sadness. Hence this place. Empathy creatures are always tricky to get rid of, because you can't just shoot them. Who are _you_?"

"I could say the same to you."

"I was just here to stop the Shade," Jenny said, "I'll be getting my dog and leaving in a minute. But when will _you_ be leaving?"

"Soon as I can since you'll have drawn the matrons up here."

"You want to sneak around a children's home undisturbed?"

"I'm visiting," she said.

"On New Year's Eve?" Jenny questioned. She could still not see the girl. Her eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark again yet; if hers hadn't, a human's definitely wouldn't have.

"My brother lives here."

"Why doesn't he live with you?" Jenny asked. Then she got her foot stamped on. "Ow!"

"You can't just ask a girl that!" she protested, "That's my private business." It suddenly struck Jenny that this girl she was wedged into a linen closet with had a very pretty voice, and was emanating warmth to quite a comfortable degree.

"It just seems suspicious!"

"I'll kick you."

"Don't do that! What am I meant to think? You're sneaking around looking for your brother who doesn't live with you in the middle of the night," Jenny said.

"You ask too many questions." Jenny had never been told she asked too many questions before, normally she didn't ask any questions at all. It was why the other smugglers liked her so much. Why anyone involved in anything suspicious liked her, really. She was as shady as the Shade she had just killed, except she didn't wear her misdeeds on her sleeve.

"Well I just saved your life."

"So you're entitled to information about it?"

"No, I…"

"He's called Otto."

"I met him," Jenny said quickly. The girl stamped on her again. "Stop doing that!"

"You're lying."

"I'm not. My dog is guarding him, he told me where to find the Shade. Is that why he's awake? Is he waiting for you?" The girl didn't answer again. "Who _are_ you?"

"I'm none of your business," she said, pushing open the door of the cupboard. Jenny could see again now. There wasn't anything left of her grenade, just a scorch mark on the floor she would leave behind. Let it become a mystery. Would anyone even notice? She followed the girl out of the cupboard, desiring quite desperately to see her in the light properly. The only light she got was from the moon, though.

Rather than leave to look for her brother, she approached the windows instead. Jenny didn't know what to do. Well, that was a lie, she knew that she should leave. But she did not. She followed the girl to the window, keeping her distance enough that she wouldn't get kicked or stepped on again.

"Why can't you visit during the day? Why do you have to sneak in?"

"The matrons don't approve of my job," she shrugged. Jenny did not press her. Maybe she was drunk? It _was_ New Year's Eve. With nothing else to do, she whistled to call the dog back towards her, when the girl spoke again, "Is it time for the fireworks yet?"

"Thirty seconds or so." The girl glanced at her, still mostly in shadow. Jenny couldn't make out much of her features, but the ghost of this woman's face definitely made an impression on her, along with everything else that had happened so far.

"You didn't check your watch."

"Don't need a watch."

"Then you'll be guessing."

"Why don't you count and see?"

"Must be about twenty left now, then? _Neunzehn_ … _achtzehn_ … _siebzehn_ …"

" _Zweiundzwanzig_ … _einundzwanzig_ …" Jenny corrected. She thought the girl smiled.

" _Zwanzig_ ," they said at the same time, then Jenny dropped it and let her continue alone again. They were relying on the fireworks going up at the exact same time, and them being visible from that side of the building. Jenny didn't think they were, she thought the window was facing the wrong direction for the main event. Already, for the last few hours, there had been straggling fireworks going off all over Berlin.

"This is practically a united country with everyone counting down together. Germans, Russians, Americans…" Jenny mused as the girl continued to count down. She got to the last few numbers. Jokingly, Jenny remarked – or rather, began to remark, "It's a shame neither of us have anybody to ki-" She was interrupted by somebody's mouth on her own. Not just interrupted, in fact, but completely winded: she might as well have been punched in the gut, she was reeling. A _girl_? In the _1960_ s?

The fireworks had launched, but Jenny had not noticed. She was vaguely aware of the lights and the bangs, significantly _more_ aware of the lips of a random stranger she had just cornered in a cupboard a minute ago making her feel like she was soaring over the moon. Then the girl let her go, and it must have only been for a few seconds. Jenny was stunned. The girl laughed.

"Who _are_ you?" Jenny managed to ask.

"Not anyone you'll want to know," was all she said.

Freddy's barking permeated her awareness, along with the loud sounds of the fireworks and distant cheering. How long ago had it been that people had started setting off fireworks on New Year's Eve? Certainly longer ago than Jenny had ever visited. Freddy came padding into the laundry room, nosing open the ajar door.

"Otto!" the girl exclaimed. The boy had come trailing after the dog, and she went to hug and lift him up while Freddy returned loyally to Jenny's side.

"There was a monster."

"I know, but my friend stopped it," the girl said, indicating Jenny. She was _her friend_? Jenny may have swooned. She did, in fact, swoon. The dog was looking at her like it knew exactly what she was thinking, what had happened, how flustered she was. Thank god it was so dark and no one could tell how ferociously she was blushing. "Say thank you, Otto."

"Thank you, Otto," he echoed. Jenny smiled.

"I need to go," Jenny said finally. Neither of them objected to her leaving at all, seemed indifferent to her presence, in fact. Besides, the girl had been right about the matrons, they would be up soon. Unless they just assumed the large bang and flash of light was an early firework, which was likely. It was probably quite lucky that the Shade had been active on New Year's Eve; she had times her capture of it very well.

But the Shade had been utterly eclipsed in her mind by this stranger. She took Freddy and left the orphanage as quietly as she could, and felt a tugging urge to return to that girl and her little brother and make sure they were going to be okay. The overwhelming knowledge that it was none of her business and that the woman was likely just drunk kept her from trying to return. Return and do what? Say what? Ask why she had kissed her? Drunkenness, no more and no less. Although Jenny could not recall the flavour of alcohol on her lips… and she _had_ been paying a great deal of attention to them, after all. But she didn't stay. She barely even considered it. She had ridded the world of a Shade and now she took Freddy with her back into the cold streets of East Berlin so that they could make their way home and turn in for the evening. New Year's Eve was something she didn't understand just like she didn't understand birthdays anymore. She was eighty-three and she had neglected to care about the celebration for decades now. And New Year's was something wholly artificial for a time traveller, and to humans she thought it must feel quite depressing. She had lived an adequate human lifetime now, and she thought that celebrating milestones like every December 31st just for the fact you've managed to reach it was a little bit like humming your own funeral march. Counting down the minutes until you were resigned to a coffin for the rest of your organic existence. This was not a popular opinion with anyone she had ever told it to, so she had stopped sharing it – along with other thoughts of hers – a good while ago.

However, Jenny did not go home that evening. She found herself walking by a few quaint buildings and then turning a corner to be overlooking the Spree. Fireworks were still being launched from all across Berlin, and she could see them firing into the air over in the West, too. How fascinating that the 'fireworks of freedom' over there should be so visible, so accessible, to people who were not supposed to see them. It was an interesting and very accidental coming-together, though the site of a multitude of drunken party-goers wandering up and down the river bank arm in arm made Jenny aware of the fact she lived in a poxy little flat above a bar. It was going to be louder there than it was on the streets, and for just a short moment she toyed with the possibility of returning to the orphanage to talk things over with that girl… that girl who had been, in the light of the moon, silhouetted against the vivid fireworks, a very memorable outline. Jenny would like to see her in daylight, to hear her talk without a sharp edge to her voice, to be in her good graces… the festivities became background noise for Jenny in her late-night wandering, and she took little notice of the scenes of raucous behaviour in the streets. All she thought about was finding something for Freddy to eat and drink while she bided her time until the morning, and the imprint of that mysterious stranger's kiss.

* * *

At ten o'clock the following morning, Jenny was cooking eggs. She was in a one-room hovel she shared with a man – bed and all – a man called Konrad Zwernemann. Like her, he was a smuggler, and like her, he often found himself having dalliances with people of the same sex. That was why she shared his bed. She had brought him into the fold of smugglers after finding him getting beaten to a pulp outside of his old apartment building. Bloodied and bludgeoned, Jenny had warded off his numerous attackers by swiftly breaking a few of their bones, and he confessed to her with a mouthful of blood that his landlord had heard from a nosey neighbour about he and another man in his flat late one night – no prizes for guessing what they had been seen doing. It was not very surprising in this culture of untrustworthiness and spying, but he had lost his home and his life because someone had found out he was gay.

Konrad was asleep in bed and stank of booze, having stayed out until four. Jenny had come back half an hour earlier once the bar had closed to customers and had done some routine tidying to take her mind off last night's events. It had not worked. The warm ghost of the mystery girl still floated tantalisingly at the corners of her vision. She had never discussed her sexuality with Konrad, interestingly enough, but she had also never discussed it with herself. It was not something she had ever thought about; she had never had much reason to. Until this enchantment had taken hold, and if Jenny had to hazard a guess she would say she had felt nothing of this sort before – except maybe for a few fleeting moments when she had met Emmett DeLacey so long ago. What _was_ it? She hadn't even seen the girl's face. Did she just admire her for her bravery in kissing her? For her loyalty to her younger brother? Was she merely intrigued by the girl's enigmatic qualities? Though Jenny could not shake the feeling that perhaps there were no 'enigmatic qualities' and she was imagining the whole thing.

It was a dingy little place they now occupied, but she was glad to have any kind of roof over her head, even if it was minute and she had to share it with another grown adult. It was one room, with one worn-out double bed, an old armchair wedged into a corner, a very small dining table with only two mismatched chairs on either side, and an incredibly basic kitchen running along one wall. She was lucky they had a kitchen in their first-floor room; when she had been told about it first by some of her current colleagues looking to recruit her a year or so ago she had assumed she would need to slip downstairs to the bar to find a kitchen (though they did have to venture downstairs to go to the toilet.) But there wasn't much of a kitchen down there, either, and Jenny and Konrad constantly found themselves making snacks for Wolfram Dietrich, their landlord and bartender, and valuable member of the criminal underground of Berlin. Wolfram lived in a house across the street with his wife and family, and Jenny didn't know how much they knew about his 'career.' But she often sent over home cooked meals for them when food ran scarce, and she was on good terms with them. She didn't know what they thought her job was, but they sometimes let her use their bath.

There was one more piece of furniture in the room; a dog bed for Freddy, though he wasn't using it, he was padding at her feet to try and snatch some of the food she was cooking. Good eggs were too hard to come by to feed to a dog, and she wasn't entirely sure of their nutritional value. There were strings tied around most of the cupboard doors in that kitchen because Freddy was so large and often ingenious, being a cross-breed of an Alaskan Malamute and a Timber Wolf. She plated up the omelettes she had been cooking – one for Konrad, three for her – and then ordered Freddy into his bed. He obeyed, being well-trained, and she switched on the radio and turned up the dial, flooding the room with the sound of _All My Loving_ by The Beatles, which hadn't been off the Western radio stations since the end of November, since around the time Kennedy got shot.

" _I'll pretend that I'm kissing, the lips I am missing, and hope that my dreams will come true_ ," Jenny joined in singing very loudly, and Konrad groaned and rolled over in bed. As Paul McCartney kept singing, Jenny joined the others on the harmony, and then went to grab hold of Konrad's foot to drag him halfway out of bed. In his anguish at her doing this, he flailed and ended up falling onto the floor. He fell with a crash about the same moment the guitar solo began, pulling his pillow with him, which he pressed his face into on the floor. She crouched down next to him and spoke, "It's ten in the morning, I've made breakfast." The Beatles kept crooning behind her. "Come on," she hit the side of his leg, "You've got a nice, plain omelette waiting." Jenny got back to her feet and carried the two plates over to the table, putting them down and then fetching cutlery and salt and pepper, the latter two of which were small sachets stolen from various cafés and diners around East and West Berlin alike. She turned the dial on the radio back down, but left it on in the background.

The smell of fresh eggs proved too enticing for Konrad, and he got to his feet and then threw himself into the chair opposite Jenny very sourly. In a strange way, he reminded her of Emmett DeLacey, but with more scars and ugly bruises. He was only wearing boxers; Jenny was still in her clothes from yesterday, often going quite a few days without changing, which was easy when she so rarely had sleep to break up her routine. She showered her omelettes in a very generous coating of salt, and Konrad just took a sprinkle of pepper because he hated salt in food, having very bland taste buds.

"I'll never forgive you for playing that trick with the radio to get those stations over here. English music gives me a headache," he complained. The 'trick' he was referring to was her sonicking their old radio, but he didn't know that was what she had done, she had lied and said she had 'tinkered.' He was none the wiser, but often threatened to smash the radio to pieces on the floor.

"Only because you don't speak English," she pointed out. He continued to scowl, so she added, "There's coffee in the pot."

"I'm moving out."

"Why's that?" she asked wryly. Konrad couldn't move out any more than she could. If either of them could afford it, they would have left long ago.

"Living here is like having a wife."

"It must be really awful having someone cook for you."

"You wouldn't know." Jenny laughed, and he grimaced. He was actually very amiable, when he wasn't hungover. Though, Konrad was quite frequently hungover, and often tested Jenny's patience with his sullenness. He had one morsel of his omelette, then shook his head slightly and got up to get a drink from the aforementioned pot of coffee. At the same time he picked a jumper of his up off the floor and dragged it on, presumably noticing how cold it was. " _Frohes neues Jahr_ , by the way, since I didn't see you last night."

" _Ja_ – where _did_ you go last night?" he asked, clearly straining his memory. It was taking him a lot of effort to hold a conversation.

"I had some business to take care of," she said. He didn't know anything about the Shade. He frowned.

"Business? You're not running extra jobs without me?"

"I wouldn't dream of it," she said, "It was a personal errand. And speaking of personal errands, I've got another one to do today."

" _Today_? We're supposed to be collecting our pay this afternoon."

"I'll be back for that," Jenny said, "Don't worry." They always went to get their money together, to make sure they weren't getting short-changed, and so that if anything went sour with any of their arrangements they at least had a fighting chance. Nothing ever _had_ gone sour, but one had to be careful when one was part of a large-scale smuggling operation.

"Where are you going?" he asked, coming and sitting back down with his coffee and again wrestling with his omelette. It was a battle between if his hunger pangs were more potent than his weakened stomach lining.

"Just to an orphanage," she said, "The Happy Children's Orphanage."

"Isn't that where you went yesterday?" She nodded. "Is it full of happy children?"

"Not particularly happy." Then he stopped what he was doing. A smile flashed across his face, the first one that day, and he put down his coffee and his fork and crossed his arms, leaning back in the chair and balancing on the back two legs. He looked awfully smug about something. "What?"

"I've got it."

"…What?"

"You're going to adopt a kid, aren't you? You're at about that stage in life."

"I'm _what_?"

"Not being married at your age-"

"I've only recently turned twenty."

"Exactly. _Der mütterliche Instinkt_ is kicking in."

"I assure you, it's not. There's isn't a motherly bone in my body."

"You're just upset because you haven't found a man yet."

"I, unlike you, am not in pursuit of a man. But if I was I could find one like _that_ ," she clicked her fingers, "I just have to go back to the orphanage to ask some… follow-up questions."

"Following up on what?"

"I think they had a break-in last night."

"Apart from you?"

"I think I saw the burglar, that's all," she half-lied, "I'd like to tell them what I saw, they can tell the police. Can't have people breaking into children's homes. I'll say I was walking past and I saw them climbing out of the window." She did not think that Konrad believed her, but he did not question her any further. She could tell that he wanted to go back to bed, and _she_ was desperate to leave. "Can you watch Freddy for me today?" Konrad glanced at the dog, who was sitting in his bed and panting happily, ogling their breakfasts. She didn't think much of the quality of 1960s dog food.

"If I don't have to walk him, then fine."

"Really? You're a dream," she smiled. This made him suspicious.

"Why are you in such a good mood?"

"This is my normal mood."

"You're normally brooding."

"Eat your breakfast," she told him sharply. Maybe there _was_ a motherly bone in her body, but that didn't mean she wanted a child. She had never wanted one, and even if she did she couldn't have one. And she certainly couldn't adopt a human one, she would stay eternally young and have to watch it die. Nothing about it appealed to her. It was enough trouble having to look after the dog.

Konrad had already exhausted the parts of his brain which dealt with socialising already that morning, the organ was still so clogged up with last night's alcohol. This suited Jenny just fine, because she didn't want him to ask her anymore questions about what she was up to. Truthfully, she didn't know what she was up to, and she got the distinct feeling she was being very stupid and reckless. But that feeling was drowned out by some different and new feelings, and in the back of her mind she kept rolling the lyrics of _All My Loving_ around in her head: _Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, tomorrow I'll miss you_ … she had heard this song many times, but it had never had any meaning for her. Any resonation. Until now, when she couldn't get it out of her head, along with the memory of the phantom girl from yesterday.

In silence she managed to wolf down the rest of her three omelettes very quickly, desperately hungry and equally desperate to leave, and she didn't even bother doing the washing up in their very small sink. Once she had finished she left her plate on the side and then picked up her heavy-duty coat from the back of her chair, leaving Emmett behind and instead taking her old Mauser C96 she had bought on the black market for very cheap. She also had a penknife in the side of her boot. For Konrad's sake she turned the radio off right before she disappeared, smiling at her briefly.

"I hope whatever boy's caught your fancy is worth it, Kitzler," Konrad called after her on her way out, and her cheeks flushed. She didn't say a word, just smiled slightly with her back to him. _I hope she's worth it too_ , she thought to herself. She _really_ hoped.

"I'll be back after lunch, _auf wiedersehen_ ," she said, picking up her keys and closing the door behind her. She left Freddy and Konrad behind and slipped quickly through the bar, moving like a ghost so as to escape Wolfram's notice, lest he try and make her clean up the mess from the night before. There was spilled booze and smashed glasses all over the place, and even a broken stool she spied, but he was conveniently in the backroom when she passed through the front and she thought she evaded him very successfully. Especially if he, like Konrad, was hungover. If there was one human vice she would never understand, it was drinking. Even smoking she found to make more sense, since at least tobacco didn't make you lose all sense of who you were in excess. She had yet to find someone who had smoked so many cigarettes they wound up asleep in a gutter filled with their own bodily excretions. Though for her, neither addiction seemed very attractive.

Jenny was pleasantly surprised to see that it was snowing that morning, and she was always fond of snow. Probably because she had so many long excursions away from planets with Earth-like climates, or away from planets at all, out in space where there was no weather. But she liked snow, and had been disappointed that it hadn't snowed on Christmas the previous week. The first snow of 1964, on the first crisp morning of 1964, and it put a smile on Jenny's face as she made her way not in the direction of the orphanage, but instead in the direction of the nearest post office, complete with her fake passport in her coat pocket. It was a very convincing fake, and Jenny needed it to pick up her correspondences, because they all came from America and this made people suspicious. She was expecting a wire transfer that day from Louisiana; it was the first day of the month and that was when her courtesy bundles of money from Viola arrived. Jenny didn't like depending on Viola O'Hara for money, especially when she had turned her back on Viola so many decades ago, but Viola had her own illegal operations going on in Europe and Jenny supplied her with information via covert telegrams. Usually information about stock prices and which foods were scarce in which areas of Germany, and then Viola would smuggle food in through different operations than Jenny's. She was profiting considerably, but it was almost a good deed. Jenny didn't mind giving her intel, and when it came to morality she was hardly one to criticise Viola, or anybody for that matter. So she didn't, she just slipped into the post office to collect what she was owed.

It wasn't too busy that morning, probably because it was ten o'clock on a Wednesday and everyone was either drunk and in bed or hungover and in work. Like the postal workers, for instance, they were in a very sombre mood when Jenny showed up and gave her name as _J. Kitzler_ and asked if there was any mail for her. Viola O'Hara's influence stretched far enough that Jenny's mail didn't get searched or opened by the strict East German border police, and that was a blessing she did not take for granted. She signed her newest alias on a chart and wrote down the time, then took the thick, sealed envelope out with her and wedged it in the pocket of her coat. It was a living wage, more or less, and afforded her nothing fancy. But it did allow her to maintain her large diet.

After picking up her post she retraced her steps from the night before, back along that same bank of the Spree, and within half an hour she was in front of the daunting, gothic façade of the orphanage the Shade had been infesting. Only this time, she didn't need to sneak in, she walked up the front steps and went calmly inside, wearing what she hoped was her sweetest, most amiable smile. This smile was met with a glare from the first woman she came across, a real vulture of a person with thick-lensed glasses set into tiny frames which made her squint down her nose at everybody, and most certainly at Jenny, whom she towered above. She was behind the front desk, monitoring visitors. Jenny glimpsed a young girl in her Sunday best crying and being led out of the building by a man and a woman; foster parents? Probably. She wondered if the girl would have a better life with them than in the orphanage. She hoped so.

The woman cleared her throat and Jenny looked away from the 'family' and back at her, faltering when it came to thinking of what to say.

" _Ja_?" the woman asked.

" _Guten Morgen_ – I was wondering if you could help me with something," Jenny began uncertainly. And she was normally such a good liar, too. The woman said nothing, only glared at her. Jenny grew very serious all of a sudden and reached into her left-hand pocket, pulling out yet another good fraud – as convincing as her passport – and this she held up to the woman. It was a Stasi ID with her name and picture on it, and the woman was forced to cooperate. "How many boys do you have here called Otto?"

"Two," the woman answered.

"We're looking into the older sister of a boy named Otto who lives here. She was photographed visiting him," Jenny lied, and added in an whisper, "Out of hours."

"You mean Otto Eicher."

"Potentially. Does he have a sister?"

"A no-good sister."

"Anything you can tell me about her would be of great help to the Party," Jenny continued. She felt rotten for doing this.

"She's not allowed to see him, we'll have to heighten the security here," said the matron.

"Ah, _nein_ ," Jenny said quickly, "She was only seen _trying_ to get in here. She didn't manage it. No need for that." She didn't want to make anything worse for the mystery girl. The woman looked at Jenny suspiciously, and Jenny didn't think she believed she was from the Stasi. But she couldn't question her about it, because it wasn't worth running the risk of her actually being one of them. "I can't disclose any information on why she's being looked into."

"She's volatile," said the matron.

"Is she?"

"Very."

"Right."

"I don't think you should have anything to do with her," said the matron coolly. She knew Jenny was not who she said she was, that was plain to see. Jenny narrowed her eyes. "She's a whore, through and through," the woman said darkly, "She needs to keep her filthy hands away from her brother so that he doesn't get tainted in the same way she is. It's a terrible life he would have if he lived with her."

"Brilliant – and where does she live, exactly?" Jenny asked.

"South of here, in Treptow." That was good, Jenny thought; she was currently in Köpenick, close to the Wall, Treptow was right underneath.

"And her name is…?" Jenny prompted. But the woman was not going to tell Jenny her name, in fact she threatened there and then to call the police, and Jenny couldn't have the _real_ Stasi showing up and investigating her. It was hard enough avoiding them normally, she couldn't start drawing attention to herself. She took that has her cue to leave. She knew which district the girl lived in and she knew her surname, Eicher, so that would surely be enough to track her down.

"If you find her, make sure you can manage to pay for her time," the matron quipped as Jenny left. Jenny did not glance back, even for a moment, but she knew what the matron meant. This girl she was looking for was a prostitute, she didn't need many hints to work that out. She had said herself yesterday that the matrons didn't 'approve' of her job, and that she wasn't someone Jenny wanted to know. It probably _was_ a good thing that Otto did not live with her, then. But it made no difference to Jenny, she still wanted to find her, though she still didn't know what she would do or say if she managed to. Would she even recognise her in daylight?

It was snowing heavier, and getting on for eleven. She would have to be back by two, but she thought she had more than enough time to comb a good portion of Treptow. _Is this stalking_ , she wondered? It was borderline, at the very least, but she didn't think wanting to know who the ghostly girl was who had kissed her in the dead of night was too weird. She wouldn't be able to rest until she knew who she was, this Fräulein Eicher. If only she had something so that Freddy could get the scent, but she did not. And it would look suspicious. Any smell was sure to be buried underneath the snow soon enough, which was falling thick and fast and dampening her hair as she passed through alleys and cracks in fences to get to Treptow quicker. And then she would have to canvass, she supposed. Go around cafés and shops, ask about, lie and said she was collecting on a debt, or she had found the girl's missing wallet, something like that.

When she reached the inner edge of Treptow she dipped into the first greasy spoon she saw, but it was to no avail. She asked around for the name of Eicher, and one person thought it rang a bell but when they asked for a description she could provide them with nothing substantial. A young woman with a pretty voice was all she had to say, she didn't even know the girl's hair colour. Just a surname. It took a substantial amount of willpower to leave without buying any food, though, She was hungry again already. But she was nervous, too, about what may happen if she did manage to find Miss Eicher.

She left and found another café, an even cheaper one than the first, but struck out there as well. None of the bars were open and she did not think an upscale restaurant was the type of place that might have information for her. If she found nothing during the day though, she would come back and try her luck at night when more places were open. Maybe she would run into the girl on the street somewhere trying for a 'fare', but she even less knew what she would do if that were to happen. It would be rude to interrupt her at work, Jenny was sure. After all, she herself was part of the criminal underworld as well, and she wouldn't want someone barging in on her when she was trying to sneak illegal American cigarettes across the Wall and into the East.

Again and again, Jenny returned back to the snow, and under the white sheets she was almost reminded of Tungtrun, but Tungtrun was much more desolate. Even on New Year's Day, and even with people so frightened of nuclear war at every turn, there was more life in one pocket of East Berlin than on the entirety of that waste planet. She would rather be living there in hiding from the Stasi and risking her life to smuggle contraband than out hunting game in an alien tundra. And Konrad wasn't so bad to live with, even if they were stuck sharing a bed. At least she didn't get cold.

She was standing on a street corner trying to find her woollen gloves in one of her pockets just after coming out of a bistro and almost buying a coffee, but deciding against it because she didn't have an awful lot of change on her, when somebody touched her arm. She looked and saw an old woman at her side.

"Have you been looking for the Eicher girl, Fräulein?" the woman asked her. Jenny pulled on one of her gloves and smiled.

"Yes, she lost her ID and I'm trying to find her to return it," Jenny easily lied. It had been the routine lie she had been telling everybody; had to keep her story straight, of course. She couldn't go mixing it up. "Does she live around here?"

"I worry a lot about that girl."

"You know her?" Jenny asked.

" _Ja_ , sadly. The poor girl – you seem nice."

"Thanks," Jenny smiled as warmly as she could, "I try my best. Manners don't cost a thing, or so they say. But do you know where I might find her?"

"She's in the _Waschsalon_ ," the woman said, pointing across the street. Jenny followed her gaze and spied the laundrette she was indicating, but could not see into the window through the frost and snow. But she grinned at the woman.

" _Danke schoen_ ," she said, clasping the woman's outstretched hand for a moment, "If you're ever in trouble – deep trouble – and you need some help, go to Dietrich's in Köpenick and ask for Kitzler." The woman was perplexed, but Jenny left her side to cross the street – narrowly avoiding getting hit by a car in the process she was so fixated on her destination – and pushed open the door. The bell above tinkled. There weren't too many people in there, it was an odd time of day for there to be a rush for people to do their washing, and especially with the weather the way it was. Jenny walked down the first row of washers and dryers, stacked one on top of the other and obscuring her view of the other side of the shop.

" _Scheiße_ ," she heard from the other side of the machines, and paused. That was the girl alright, she had never thought anybody else sounded pretty when they were cursing. She heard her mumble something about change, and Jenny reached into her pocket and drew out a handful of marks and pfennigs and sorted the correct change for the machine. And then her wish to see this girl in daylight (or underneath bright halogen lightbulbs) was granted. Jenny could not conjure up the words to describe how beautiful she thought this girl was, this girl she had been trying to track down all morning, and now it was almost noon. She had lost a lot of time, an hour in fact, scouring Treptow from top to bottom. Two hours to get back to Dietrich's to get her payment with Konrad. But that all paled in comparison to Fräulein Eicher, who had light brown hair and grey-blue eyes and was beautiful yet dishevelled. She didn't see Jenny yet, though. She was trying to find the change to get the dryer to work. Jenny steeled her nerves and walked over, then leant on the next machine along and cleared her throat.

The girl glanced up and gasped and swore again under her breath when she saw Jenny.

"Did you need some change?" Jenny asked, holding out her hand and the change in it. And then the girl kicked her again, in her shin. "Hey!"

"You're the girl from last night!" she hissed.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"You followed me!"

"I wouldn't say I followed you, I found you," said Jenny, "Do you want the change or not?" The girl looked at the change in Jenny's palm and then snatched it, looking at her very suspiciously. In complete silence she put the money in the coin slot and switched on the machine, then turned to Jenny and crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes. Jenny got the inkling that this had been a very bad idea.

"What's this about? Is this to do with that thing I saw last night?"

"What did you see last night?" Jenny asked.

"That thing! You said you 'saved me' from it."

"Oh, _that_ thing. _Nein_ , this isn't about that."

"Then what? Following me all the way here – how did you find me?"

"Just asked around. The people at that orphanage really don't like you, do they?" Jenny tried to make a joke, but she didn't find it funny. She scowled. "Uh… a woman said she was worried about you and she told me you were in here."

"Urgh. That'll be Ms. Schneider again. She lives in my building. She brings me fruit and says I don't look healthy."

"I think you look fine," Jenny smiled. The girl frowned at here. "Wait, I mean – not _fine_. Great. You look…"

"I look like I should eat more fruit." Jenny didn't say anything else, lest she continue to put her foot in her mouth. "Stop staring at me."

"Do you like coffee?"

" _Ja_ , I suppose."

"Great, I would kill for one right about now, and something to eat. How about it? On me," Jenny offered. She could afford it, after all. The girl looked out of the window at the snow, deep in thought. Then she bit her lip, which Jenny thought was very attractive, and sighed, meeting Jenny's eyes again.

"If you're sure," she said guardedly.

"I'm due to get paid this afternoon, don't worry about it," said Jenny. "What's your name, by the way?"

"Astrid," the girl answered. _That's a pretty name_ , Jenny thought but didn't say. She did not want to overstep. "What's yours?"

"I'm Jenny."

"It's pretty," she commented with a small smile. Jenny had never blushed so fiercely in her life. "Coffee, then?"

"Do you know anywhere nice?" Jenny asked.

"Not really. Come on, if you're so keen," Astrid smiled and walked past her to go around the other row of machines and get to the exit. It took Jenny a long few moments to realise she ought to follow instead of just stare, and she struggled to catch back up again as Astrid left the shop to return to the snow. Astrid went the opposite way to the area Jenny had been combing as well, which could only be a good thing because Jenny wouldn't be recognised and nobody could mention how she had gone into more than two-dozen different eateries and asked after her. "Do you come here often? This area of the city?"

"No, never," Jenny said, "I've got the streets memorised from maps, but I've never really been; when I go for walks I usually go further north, or follow the river along."

"Memorised?"

"It's a… hobby." Astrid looked unconvinced when she glanced back at Jenny in the heavy snow, but amused.

"You're strange."

"I am?"

"Through here," Astrid led Jenny into yet another café, and the smell of hot food washed over her. It was remarkable there were so many places to eat in such a small radius, and that they still had food. She didn't think the mid-winter food situation was improving, after all, and she relied on skimming extras from her smuggling jobs to be afforded luxuries like half-decent coffee and dairy products. Glimpsing a plate of scrambled eggs on a table by her side though, she was unsure if there was any real egg in there. It was probably made of powdered egg. But food was food, and rather powdered egg than starve to death. She was a girl used to military rations and hardships anyway; the East Berlin situation was nothing new, and in many ways it was better than the worlds she had lived in before.

Jenny reached inside her coat and ripped open the envelope from Viola discreetly, thumbing through the bundle of money to try to detach a note with the correct value. Jenny was sure the ostmarks she got posted were fraudulent, that or fresh from the printing press, but they were good fakes if they were and she had yet to be picked up on it. _She_ couldn't detect any traces of fraud, but she did not claim to be an expert. She finally extracted a note from her pocket, worth ten marks, which was a considerable amount more than their lunch would cost. She took advantage of this to try and order as much as she could, enough for at least three people (as always.)

Then she looked at Astrid, leaning on the counter, and asked, "What did you want?" and Astrid stared at her.

"You ordered at least three meals," she began, "All for yourself?"

"Mm," Jenny smiled, "Really, though?"

"Just a bratwurst," Astrid said, "And coffee." Coffee they got straight away, the classic Soviet-made coffee which was practically dirty with maybe one coffee granule mixed in if you were lucky, but the food they would have to wait for. Jenny did not mind waiting, and Astrid couldn't go far because her laundry was in the dryer. So they went and sat down by the window, with the snow piling up outside, and Jenny did not know what to say now she had discovered this girl. "You've followed me halfway across East Berlin, then?"

"No, maybe a fifth of the way across. I only live in Köpenick."

"Where in Köpenick?"

"Near the Wall."

"Everything in this city is 'near the Wall.'"

"Well then, I'm _very_ near the Wall. As close as you can be without getting shot by the Russians."

"Why would anybody want to live that close to it…"

"Business purposes," she said cryptically.

"And you went to the orphanage? Asked after me? After Otto?"

"Not him, just you."

"Why?" Jenny didn't answer. She knew why, but she didn't know if she should – or even _could_ – say. Astrid narrowed her eyes and changed the subject in response to Jenny's silence. "What did the matrons say about me?"

"Not particularly nice things."

"Probably true things."

"They said if I found you to make sure to have some cash on me to pay for your time."

" _Hündinnen_ ," she muttered, shaking her head. Then she eyed Jenny carefully. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, aren't you disgusted?"

"By what?"

"Me."

" _You_? Not at all, why would I be? I know you're…" she paused and thought about what to say, "I know what you do for a living, if they're telling the truth. It's your life. I met you yesterday, what right have I got to say anything about it? And I wouldn't say anything to insult you when you're so kindly here with me in the first place. Anyone else would have slapped me and run away, I think."

"Well, you're paying for my time," she jibed, nodding at something behind Jenny. Jenny looked and saw an obscene amount of food arriving, much to the envy of the people around them, and she largely regretted buying so much now. Maybe she _was_ starving, but there were rations for a reason. Greed was unbecoming. She saw one family sharing a solitary bowl of stew between four of them, a mother and three young children, the children staring at all of Jenny's food.

"Give this one to them, over there," Jenny said to the waitress, pointing out the family, "You know, give them both, actually. Except this sausage, let me just grab that…" she picked a large sausage up from one of the plates and loaded it onto the one she had kept for herself, and the waitress gave her a funny look, but carried the food over to the family. Astrid stared at her, as the mother very loudly expressed her gratitude across the breadth of the café. While Jenny told her it was absolutely no trouble at all, Astrid took some cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. The ashtray on the table was already full to bursting of paper stubs and piles of tobacco ash. Jenny wished the family a happy new year.

"Why did you do that?" Astrid enquired with a strange, cool tone of voice. Distant.

"I don't need all that food, really. I _could_ have eaten it, and I would have liked to eat it, but… I didn't want to be greedy," she stabbed a fat meatball with her fork and bit into it. It was not a particularly good meatball, but she was famished. It had been almost three hours since she last ate, after all. Astrid continued to smoke. "What were we talking about?"

"Just me, but I might like to talk about you now. You're a very unusual specimen."

"Specimen?"

" _Probestück_. Mysterious girl in an orphanage hunting a monster, follows me home for no obvious reason, carries ten mark notes around in her pocket, donates her lunch to strangers. And pays for the company of prostitutes."

"I'm not paying for your company," said Jenny, "If you're not willingly allowing me-"

"It's a joke."

"Oh."

"I'm 'willingly allowing you' to pay me. For my company." She was smirking. Jenny didn't know what to make of that. She didn't want to be a client. Astrid could clearly tell that Jenny was unnerved though, and leant across the table to whisper, "I wouldn't charge a woman. One of my rules." Jenny's cheeks felt hot again. Jenny took that opportunity to ask the question she had been dying to for more than twelve hours now.

"Why did you kiss me?" she hissed, frightened that somebody might hear. Who knew if the room was bugged? It could be. Any room could be. The Stasi weren't exactly fond of homosexuality. Astrid shrugged.

"You're cute." She felt even hotter. It was such a simple answer, too. Jenny hadn't even considered it. She didn't know _what_ she had considered.

"Were you drunk?"

"No."

"It was New Year's Eve."

"You weren't drunk either. I had to visit Otto, I wouldn't do that drunk. He'd start believing the things people tell him about me," she explained, "Besides, it's the one night a year where everybody else is drunk, and I like to be sober that night. The only time I can feel superior. But I'm very rarely _not_ sober."

"Do you not drink?"

" _Nein_ , you have to keep your wits about you in a city like this. You never know when somebody might take an interest for the worst." Jenny nodded her agreement with this.

"I don't drink," she said, "I don't smoke, either." Astrid laughed.

"Then how do you relax?" She took another drag on the cigarette in her hand.

"Go for walks."

"Memorise maps?" she suggested.

"Sometimes."

"What's your surname?"

"Kitzler," she actually had to think to remember what her alias was.

"Jenny Kitzler?"

"That's right."

"Hmph." Jenny frowned. Astrid leant back and put her feet up on the chair next to Jenny, which was bad manners, but Jenny didn't pick her up on it. She was still smoking. "What's 'Jenny' short for?"

"It's not short for anything."

"She just gets stranger," Astrid jibed.

"I don't think it's _that_ strange."

"I can't think of anything about you that _isn't_ strange. Not out of what I know so far. Where, in Köpenick, do you live? Exactly?"

"In a room above a bar. It's called Dietrich's. Why?"

"What if I want to return the favour and stalk _you_ across East Berlin?" She stubbed out the cigarette in the overloaded ashtray.

"You're very welcome to, but I have a roommate," she said.

"Oh yeah?" Astrid asked wryly.

"In just the one room, too. We have to share a bed. It's alright though, he prefers the company of men," she said quietly.

"Is that something you two don't have in common?" Jenny was taken aback. Was she being _flirted_ with? She couldn't tell. She proceeded to laugh incredibly awkwardly. She was eighty-three, _why_ was this happening? The girl could only be in her early twenties, it was preposterous for her to have this kind of effect. "You like me, then?" Jenny, again, was unable to speak. "It's obvious. It was obvious last night, and it's more obvious now. Now that I can see you blushing. Do you have the time?"

"Ten-past-one." Astrid sighed.

"My laundry still has a while."

"So does my lunch and my coffee."

"And my cigarettes."

"I suppose we're sticking around, then?"

"Oh, sure. I'm enjoying this." She took out a second cigarette, but when she opened her matchbook she found it to be empty. This made her swear again.

"Enjoying what?" Jenny asked, taking her own matchbook out of her pocket, one from Dietrich's she kept just in case it came in useful, and it often did. She struck a match and held it out, and Astrid, cigarette between her teeth, leant over close enough to light it. Jenny shook the match and wedged it in the ashtray as well when she was done, and then on a whim held out the matchbook to Astrid, "Here, in case you ever want to follow me home. That's from the bar I live above." Astrid was very surprised by this for some reason, though it wasn't much of a gesture. She took the matchbook and its remaining five or so matches and scrutinised it very closely. "What are you enjoying? What did you mean?"

"Making you flustered, that's what I'm enjoying." This just made Jenny _more_ flustered. "Honestly, I had no idea you were so pretty. It was dark last night."

"I could say the same to you."

"Say it, then," she challenged.

Jenny clenched her jaw, then said quite begrudgingly, "You're beautiful." Astrid laughed.

"You haven't got any conviction!"

"I'm worried about being overheard."

" _Nein, nein_ , don't worry about that," she said, "There are more interesting conversations to listen to around here than ours." Jenny couldn't see anyone listening in, that was true. But you could never be sure. "Nobody cares about what two women get up to."

"We're not getting up to anything," Jenny said, drinking some coffee.

"Not _yet_." Jenny nearly spat her coffee out onto the table. This, Astrid found very amusing. "Like I said: _cute_. Anyway, I had to walk to and from the _Waschsalon_ twice to carry everything, it would be nice to have somebody to help take it all home."

"Home?" She nodded. "As in, your home? Where you live? And me? Carrying things?"

"Unless you want to carry them to my second, secret flat where I _don't_ live."

"But, really."

"Yes, my 'home where I live.' Or do you have somewhere to be?"

"Me? No. Nowhere. I'm free as a bird."

* * *

When she had been invited into the home of one Fräulein Astrid Eicher, she hadn't expected to awaken some hours later tied to a chair. Jenny had only been hoping for a second kiss – and not even hoping, _wishing_ , and she really would have been satisfied with a hug, or a friendly smile, or just a 'this has been fun.' It did not seem that she got any of those, however, or if she had she could not remember. But she was struggling to remember a lot of things, like what, exactly, had transpired between returning to the laundrette to collect Astrid's things and this current moment in which she was waking up a prisoner.

From what little she _could_ recall after arriving at Astrid's very modest flat, she was still there, only now it was dark and she had sellotape around her ankles and wrists binding her to a flimsy wooden chair. She could get out of this easily, but she didn't want to try yet. Not until she worked out what was going on. All she remembered was feeling sleepy, so sleepy it had become quite troubling to her because she was not supposed to sleep for at least three more days, but she hadn't been able to fight it. That was when Jenny realised she must have been drugged, and as soon as she realised that she heard somebody cocking a gun right behind her head. She froze. She couldn't escape the chair faster than it would take her assailant to pull the trigger. Jenny was trapped.

"You shouldn't have woken up this quickly."

"Astrid!?" she exclaimed, "Are you pointing a gun at me!?" Astrid laughed.

"I bet you thought you'd outsmarted me."

"What!?"

"Don't play dumb. Just because I've beaten you. Who do you work for?" Astrid questioned her, then walked around from the back of the chair. Jenny saw that she was only wearing underwear, and very nice underwear for that matter with a _divine_ , pink silk dressing gown to match. _Well_ , Jenny thought _, she was a prostitute, after all_. Looking good in bed probably earnt her extra money, and who was Jenny to complain? She still thought this girl – this manic, armed girl who was smoking again – was gorgeous. Why was she undressed?

"Is that _my_ gun?" Jenny asked when she paid attention to the weapon in Astrid's hand, and recognised it as her own very distinct Mauser C96.

"It was hidden in your coat, so I assume so." Jenny had loaded her gun before leaving, too, and she doubted Astrid would have emptied it of bullets. "This gun has a Wehrmacht on it, too – what's a girl doing carrying a Nazi gun around? Especially in the Soviet zone?" Astrid had all of Jenny's possessions from inside her coat lain out neatly on the coffee table.

"I appreciate this all looks quite suspicious, but I can explain-" she didn't have any qualms about telling Astrid she was a smuggler, but Astrid had other ideas, and shushed her. That was where the Mauser came from, after all, it was just an old World War Two relic she had picked up which had belonged to a Luftwaffe officer once upon a time.

" _I_ can explain," she said, picking up something else from the table, what looked like a piece of paper.

"Oh, _that_ … well that's…" Jenny was face-to-face with a very small picture of herself, the picture printed onto the front of her fraudulent Stasi ID. Damn that thing for being such a convincing fake.

"' _Schild und Schwert der Partei', ja_?" Astrid mocked.

"I don't work for the Stasi, it's a fake," Jenny said.

"That's just what a spy would say." Jenny couldn't fault her, it probably was what a spy would say. "What about this?" She now picked up the wads of brand-new ostmark notes Jenny had been given by Viola, "Are these fake, also?"

"I'm not sure," she answered honestly.

" _Not sure_?"

"No, I have no idea."

"And you have a letter from America," Astrid said, "Which side are you working for? The Russians or the Americans? Or are you some kind of ex-Hitler Youth vigilante?"

"I don't work for either side – and I'm certainly not a Nazi."

"When's your birthday?"

"The Twenty-Fourth of July," she told the truth.

"Of what year?" And Jenny faltered. The drugs were still in her system, she struggled to remember that it had just turned 1964, and then she couldn't remember what her fake age was in order to subtract it. "You're trained very badly in this assumed identity if you can't even remember how old you're supposed to be. And earlier, when I asked for your surname, you paused like you had to think about it."

"It's a fake name."

"Fake name, fake money, fake ID, foreign correspondence, and you're not even German-"

"Excuse me? You don't know I'm not German."

"When you were about to faint you kept saying ' _I'm tired_ ,'" Astrid said with a heavy accent, "That's English, _ja_? I wouldn't normally drug someone, but I wanted to know why I was being spied on. You slipped up so easily, you didn't even have an accent. And yet, your German is impeccable."

" _I speak French fluently as well, are you going to accuse me of being part of the Resistance from World War Two_?" Jenny questioned her angrily, in French. But clearly Astrid did not speak French, because she looked at her blankly, then frowned. Then Jenny thought perhaps proving her prowess at multiple languages wasn't the best way to convince Astrid she wasn't a spy. Astrid was still pointing a gun at her head, but Jenny thought she was much too intrigued to fire it. "If I was a spy, I'm sure somebody would have shown up here to rescue me by now. I'm clearly a rubbish one."

"I telephoned this Dietrich's you said you live at."

"And?"

"They corroborated you, they said you live upstairs, Kitzler. Then they asked where you were, apparently you missed an appointment this afternoon."

"I-? Oh no! Konrad…" she hoped he was alright. "Listen, Astrid, I'm not a spy. I traced you because I like you, alright? I like you, I liked kissing you, you're a girl, I thought that was exciting because it's not the kind of thing you expect from East Germany in the 1960s. I haven't lied to you once, about anything, since we met. Yesterday."

"How can I believe anything you say? You could be KGB for all I know. Or CIA."

"I'm not! You said yourself, you think I'm English."

" _Are_ you English?"

"It's complicated."

"Well, were you born in England?"

"No."

"Then where?"

"Very far away from here and not for a long time yet," she said.

"What's _that_ supposed to me?"

"Look, I'm a smuggler. That's why I have the fake ID, the fake passport, that's where I get the weird money from, and how I got the old Luftwaffe gun, and the letters from America – I have a friend over there who runs an enormous crime syndicate, the O'Hara crime syndicate, she wires me money in exchange for information about market fluctuations over here so that she knows what kind of products to import illegally to make the best profit. There's access to a tunnel network underneath Dietrich's, we go into the West and bring things back to the East. I was supposed to go and pick up my payment with my roommate, Konrad, the gay one, but I got distracted."

"So you _do_ work for the American capitalists, then?"

"I… fine, I work for the American capitalists, but it's mainly because I don't like seeing people go hungry, and because I have a certain skillset that means I'm good at that kind of work. Illegal work. Honestly, I would have told you all of this if you'd _asked_." Astrid put the gun down on the table and crossed her arms. Jenny may now have the opportunity to break out of her restraints, but didn't have much reason to. She thought that Astrid believed her.

"How did you come to be involved in an American crime syndicate?"

"Also complicated."

"…Complicated how?"

"Just generally. Complicated."

"I'm not stupid, Jenny," she said coolly, "If that _is_ your real name."

"'Jenny' is. 'Kitzler' isn't. And I don't think you're stupid, I just think that you won't believe me and you'll think I'm making fun of you."

"I didn't make fun of you when you saved me from that thing last night. The 'Shade.' Or that device you used to trigger the funny light-bomb. All of _that_ I think I've rather taken in my stride, thank you very much."

"Fine, I'll tell you everything, if you tell me one thing," Jenny said.

"What's that?" Astrid asked, perching herself on the edge of the coffee table. She was clearly not afraid of Jenny, which either meant she was underestimating her combat abilities, or she was correctly estimating how fond Jenny was of her. Because Jenny wasn't going to harm a hair on her head, even if she had to stay taped to a chair for the rest of her life.

"Do you actually like me? Or has everything been fake?"

"It would have been too hard to fake if I _didn't_ like you."

"Please, a prostitute who can't fake liking somebody?"

"Men are much easier to fool, and I don't feel bad about it," she shrugged, "I told you. I don't charge women. If I could pick one over the other, I would pick girls. Because of girls like you, so, _ja_ , I guess, _Ich mag dich_. You're cute. Now it's your turn." She crossed one leg over the other and waited for Jenny to explain herself in full. And Jenny was an excellent liar, but when she saw those grey eyes, she couldn't bear to be untruthful.

"I'm from a different planet. In the future. I'm not a human." Astrid burst out laughing. "I'm serious!"

"You're _serious_? _Nein_ , that's _lächerlich_!"

"I'm eighty-three years old."

"Ha! An old lady? You're older than Ms. Schneider."

"I _am_ older than her. And that thing you saw last night was from another world, why can't I be?"

"You're much too pretty to be a little green person from Mars."

"I'm not from Mars. I'm from a planet called Messaline, and I was born on the Twenty-Fourth of July in the year 6012. I'll prove it; take my pulse."

"Your pulse?"

"I've got two hearts," Jenny said, "Unless you have a stethoscope-"

"I do," Astrid said, standing up. Jenny was perplexed, and watched her make her way over to her kitchen. The flat was small, but it had two rooms and a bathroom, so Astrid was already doing miles better than Jenny was. And she didn't have to share it with anybody, either. It was actually quite nice, if it a bit bare, and shrouded in darkness at the moment.

"Why do you have a stethoscope?"

"In case I have to play the 'sexy nurse.' I have an entire outfit." Jenny couldn't help but picture it, especially when Astrid returned with the stethoscope around her neck, still wearing silk and lingerie. Jenny could not take her eyes off even the stockings, let alone the rest of the woman.

"Why are you in your underwear?" Jenny finally asked.

"I thought it might get you to cooperate more." Jenny couldn't really fault her, because it had probably worked. Though she would almost certainly have behaved in the exact same way even if Astrid wasn't undressed. But she could hardly complain. "Where are these hearts, then?" She sat down on the edge of the coffee table again and leant closer, holding her hand out with the cold end of the stethoscope all ready to experiment.

"One on the left, one on the right," Jenny said, "Take your pick." Astrid went for the left heart first (Astrid's left, that was) and pressed down the metal stethoscope. "I'm actually warmer than humans, too. If you've got a thermometer as well."

"Strange, inserting thermometers into private areas is something the men who ask me to dress up like a nurse want, too," she commented. Jenny went red.

"I didn't mean like _that_ -"

Astrid smiled, "I know you didn't." She moved the stethoscope now to the other side of Jenny's chest, and Jenny waited patiently and regretted mentioning her temperature, because she didn't want Astrid's 'client thermometer' coming anywhere near her. After a few seconds of listening, however, the smile disappeared from her face and she dropped the stethoscope onto the floor, getting up and backing away from Jenny. "How do you do that? Is that some kind of trick?"

"No," Jenny said, "I've got two hearts. I told you that you wouldn't believe me and you'd think I was making fun of you. And look at that, you didn't believe me. That device I used to trigger the bomb, it's sonic, it's in my boot, the right one. It's from the future, just have a look at it." Astrid narrowed her eyes and, though wary of Jenny, she carefully knelt down in front of her and untied Jenny's laces. "You know you could cut this tape off. I'm not going to attack you or run away."

"How am I supposed to know what you're liable to do if you're who – _what_ – you say you are?" Astrid challenged.

"You could just trust me," Jenny muttered as Astrid pulled off her shoe, then turned it upside-down. Onto the floor fell Jenny's penknife and her sonic screwdriver. The knife Astrid picked up and put onto the table with the rest of her things, but the screwdriver she held up, then she got back to her feet and carried it all the way over to a nearby lamp.

"Why is it glowing?"

"It's emitting a jamming signal in a twenty-foot radius, in case of any bugs," Jenny explained.

"You mean _this_ protects you from the Stasi?"

"More or less," Jenny said, "Me and anybody around me. In a twenty-foot radius." Hearing that, Astrid wandered back over to Jenny, and very carefully set the screwdriver down, eyeing it. "It does other things, too. It can open locked doors; give me access to Western radio stations; and I can start cars without needing the keys."

"If this is true, and you really are… _ein Außerirdische_ , then what does that mean?"

"'Mean'?"

"For humanity. Are you here to wipe us out? Kill us? Like in the stories?"

" _Nein_! I'm not going to kill anybody. I'm just here because… I don't know. I can do some good, I suppose. I've lived in a lot of places. Like in America, eighty years ago, in the 1920s."

" _Eighty years ago_?"

"Yeah. I lived in New Orleans, got involved in the mob, with the O'Haras. Then I moved to Britain and helped the Royal Air Force with the war effort. Then I went fifty-thousand years in the future and ran off with an alien circus where I worked as an acrobat – and if you want me to prove I was an acrobat, I can do that, too. I could also draw you an incredibly complex schematic of the engine of a Spitfire, or if you have a bath and enough of Ms. Schneider's fruit left over I could make some very potent moonshine. Honestly, I've got photographs hidden at Dietrich's to prove everything I'm telling you. And relics from the future, like a space-gun."

" _Space-gun_?" Jenny nodded. Astrid shook her head. "If you're from another planet, then how can you speak German so perfectly? Or English? Or French?"

"I assimilate, it's just something I do, I don't know," Jenny said, "I can speak every language. Like, _every_ language. Ever. Fluently. Without trying. I can also play the fiddle, and the harp. And - I'd just like to point out that I did rescue you _and_ your brother from an extra-dimensional monster last night."

"Are there many of your… species?"

"No. There's me and my father," she said stiffly.

"Where's he? Is he in Berlin too?"

"I don't know where he is. I've been looking for him."

"For how long?"

"Eighty-three years." Astrid got the message then that Jenny's father was a sore subject, a _very_ sore subject. She also wasn't actively 'looking' for him anymore. She didn't know what her aim was in her wandering, but she never stayed in one place for more than a few years anymore. Her twenty-year stint in the Twentieth Century before seemed ridiculous in retrospect.

"Is this what you really look like?"

"Excuse me?"

"Maybe you… transform. I don't know. You could be a slimy, hairy monster for all I know."

"Uh… this is what I look like. No slime, sorry. Just me."

"Wait… so you're telling me… you're an orphan alien girl here to try and help people, and you thought I was pretty, so you found out who I was, and now… I've drugged and kidnapped you!?" Astrid was, all of a sudden, horrified at her own behaviour. She gasped and put her hands to her mouth and stood up, " _Ficken! Es tut mir leid! Scheiße, scheiße_ …" Astrid immediately picked up Jenny's penknife and began to hack away at the sellotape binding her to the chair, which Jenny thought was quite funny, especially considering how red Astrid suddenly was with embarrassment. " _Mein mutter_ always said I didn't know how to take a compliment…"

"What did you drug me with?"

"Sleeping pills, I crushed them up and put them in another cup of coffee," she explained, "Really, I'm sorry, this is horrible, I can't believe what you must have been going through…"

"It's not the first time someone's tied me up and held a gun to my head, not by a mile," Jenny said, "But it's the first time I've been seduced first." Astrid said nothing more, but finally finished cutting through the tape on Jenny's arms. It stung quite a bit when Jenny ripped it off, and it took more than a few hairs with it. "Honestly, I probably would have thought the same thing if it had been the other way around. Especially since the Stasi and the KGB would love to get their hands on me, with my connections and knowledge of the smuggling routes."

"You shouldn't confide so readily; I could be an informant."

"If you were an informant I doubt you would have tied me up. Really though, it's a nice change of pace to be interrogated by a half-naked woman."

"Do you want some bandages for your arms?"

" _Bandages_? No, thank you," she laughed, "I'll be fine. I've had worse. Where's my coat, though? I'd better leave." She asked this right as her ankles were also freed from their sticky restraints. "I have to make sure Konrad's alright – he's going to kill me, I made him watch the dog all day, I said I'd be back by two."

"Yeah, leave, of course, you should leave…" Astrid said, going and fetching Jenny's coat from wherever she had put it, "And forget where I live, probably."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to see a girl who drugged me and tied me to a chair ever again. I'd want to forget she ever existed," said Astrid.

"That's ridiculous, you're gorgeous, why would I want to forget you?" Jenny was pulling on her coat.

"You're _still_ attracted to me? A poor, paranoid prostitute who kidnapped you? And not to mention – the big problem – _another woman_."

"Same-sex marriage is going to be completely legal in Germany in just over fifty years, actually. And a few dozen other countries," said Jenny, "Or so I hear. Nobody seemed to mind when I was in the army in the Forty-Ninth Century. I told you, my roommate likes men. I saved him from getting beaten to a pulp by a gang on the streets after getting kicked out of his apartment."

"Saved him from a gang? How did you do that?"

"Well, I'm a hand-to-hand combat and martial arts expert. Honestly, I could have broken out of that chair and taken the gun at any point," she said, "If I didn't have a thing for you, you'd have more than a few broken bones by now." As she spoke she picked up the contents of her pockets from Astrid's coffee table and then sat down in the chair again so that she could put her boots back on.

"Who else knows those things about you, Jenny? That you're… you know. Not human."

"Nobody, actually. Except Viola."

"Who?"

"Viola O'Hara, who sends me the money. She was bound to find out, she put me up in her house for almost a decade and I didn't age a day."

"A beautiful, eighty-three-year-old criminal from outer space likes _me_?" Astrid questioned.

"I suppose so."

"Well, when you put it _that_ way…" she put a hand on each arm of the chair Jenny was in and then leant tantalisingly close, and Jenny froze and stopped what she was doing with her shoelaces to try and get away, "Who's to say I should even let you leave?"

" _Let_ me leave?"

"I bet I could keep you here for days."

"Mm, I bet you could, too," Jenny said, rendered utterly useless by the proximity of this girl.

"Nobody else in East Germany knows your secrets? Just me?"

"It looks that way."

"What did you want when you decided to trace me?"

"I… don't know. I suppose, maybe, just a little bit, I was hoping there was some possibility of a second kiss from you, but it really doesn't-" Jenny got her second kiss from Astrid Eicher, as soon as she asked for it. A much deeper and warmer kiss than her first one had been, and one which quickly proceeded into a third, and a fourth, and a fifth… " _Aufhören_ , stop." Astrid desisted immediately, leaning back again, with a very wide smile on her face, and not the smug smile she had been wearing when she thought she had outsmarted and captured a secret agent. A genuine one. "I really do have to go and see if Konrad is alright."

"If you're sure I can't convince you to stay a while longer."

"Honestly, any other night and you'd have me wrapped around your finger," Jenny said, Astrid moving and letting her stand up finally. Then she got an idea. "Well – why don't you come with me?"

"With you? To your smuggler's den?"

"To explain why you rang them up earlier and asked after me. Who knows, maybe they think you're with the Stasi. And to show Konrad that I had a good reason for missing our collection this month," Jenny said, "Plus, I could show you my photo album, prove that I really have been around since the 1920s. Or do you have something to do? A client?"

"Client? _Nein_ , I'm set for a few weeks. Somebody paid for the privilege of having me all over Christmas," she said.

"Lucky."

"Does that bother you?"

"Your job? No, why would it? Unless my smuggling bothers _you_." Astrid shrugged.

"No."

"Well, then. Maybe get dressed. If you want to come. I really don't want to go, you know," said Jenny, "I just have obligations. Company for my obligations would be _wunderbar_. Especially from my new favourite person." Astrid laughed.

"You must not know a lot of people, then."

"I can't deny that."

"…Then, yes. I'll come with you. Even in this terrible weather, with two feet of snow, I'll come with you. I think we have things to talk about. The mutual attraction." Jenny followed Astrid to the next room, a very small but incredibly well-decorated bedroom, which must be where she brought her clientele. "Did you come in here to watch me get dressed?"

"No, I just want to talk more!" Jenny defended herself, "I'll turn around."

"You don't have to turn around. We're both women, after all."

"True enough... So, the 'mutual attraction'? I think the word you're looking for is ' _Freundinnen_ '."

"I met you less than a day ago."

"But it's been a very intense day," Jenny said, "You could always decide to dump me tomorrow. Break both of my hearts."

"Not when there must be so many advantages to being the lover of a prolific smuggler."

"That's a good point. I could get you American-made, West German coffee, imported," Jenny said, "It's much nicer than anything the Russians might send over."

"Not to mention your fraudulent ostmarks. How many of those do you get a month?"

"Enough that I'll be alright after I give Konrad all my pay for December," Jenny said.

"Why would you do that?" Astrid stopped to ask her this in the middle of putting on a dress. Jenny thought it was too cold for a dress, _way_ too cold.

"Because I promised him I'd be back by two and I wasn't, so he was in more danger – especially with you telephoning and asking after me, they probably think they have a leak. It's only fair. And he needs it more than me – he doesn't know I get money from America, don't say anything about that. In fact, he doesn't even know I'm not German, he thinks I'm from Dresden."

"You would give him your whole wage for a month?"

"Yes." Astrid stepped forward and kissed Jenny _again_ , and Jenny broke away, laughing. "I said to stop."

"I'm sorry, but you're being so charming."

"Then I promise to continue being charming once we leave and are out in the snow. Until then, no charm whatsoever. I'm going to be utterly repugnant for the next ten minutes."

"This _Freundin_ thing… now that I'm thinking about it… it doesn't seem quite so ridiculous. Still considerably ridiculous, but less-so. I'll let you know my final thoughts on it in the morning."

"I'm going to see you in the morning, am I?"

"I'll tell you what I've decided as soon as I wake up."

"And how are you going to do that? We don't live anywhere near each other."

"Jenny, that's for me to know and you to find out," she said wryly, and Jenny knew _exactly_ what she meant.


End file.
